If there is one thing more dreary than looking for a situation, it is what is commonly called "hunting up one's friends." I found many, but some were old and indifferent, others too much engrossed in their own affairs to have any time to devote to mine. Some shook hands, wished me well, promised to do all they could to help me, and before I had passed from their sight forgot my existence. I gave up my friends. Their help in the hour of need is a beautiful theory, but very seldom put into practice. Just as I was growing dull and dispirited, a friend upon whom I had not called, and whose aid I had not solicited, wrote to me and offered me a situation as clerk in his office, with a salary of eighty pounds per annum, to be afterward increased. God send to every weary heart the comfort this news brought to mine. I ran to Clare with the letter in my hands. "Eighty pounds a year, darling!" I cried; "there is a fortune." We had neither of us ever had much to do with money; we were quite ignorant of its value, how far it would go, what it would purchase, etc. It seemed an inexhaustible sum. We had cheap, comfortable apartments in Holloway--a room for my sister and two smaller rooms for myself. When I think of her patience, her resignation, her unvarying sweetness, her constant cheerfulness, my heart does homage to the virtue and goodness of women. One fine morning in September I went for the first time to work. The office of Lawson Brothers was in Lincoln's Inn. The elder brother seldom if ever appeared; the younger was always there. He gave me a very kindly welcome, said he hoped I should not find my work tiresome, showed me what I had to do, and, altogether, set me at my ease. I sighed many times that morning to find of how little use was my college education to me now and I sighed to think how all my dreams, all my hopes and aspirations, had ended behind a clerk's desk, with eighty pounds per annum in lieu of the fortune of which I had dreamed. After a few days I became used to the novelty and did my best to discharge my duties well. Hundreds of young men in London lead lives similar to mine, with very little variety; the only way in which I differed from them was that I had my sister Clare to provide for. Alas! how soon I found out what a small sum eighty pounds a year was! When we had paid the rent of our three rooms, set aside a small sum for clothes and a small sum for food, there was nothing left. Clare, whose appetite was dainty and delicate, suffered greatly. I could not manage to provide even a bunch of grapes for her; the trifling coppers I spent in flowers, that cheered her as nothing else ever did, were sorely missed.