‘But a pretty mess I’ve made of my affairs in London! My father does not know of half my debts. Hardly know of half of them myself. Incontinent contractions. Tavern bills, sixty or seventy pounds—maybe a hundred. Tailors? can’t calculate. Saloons and night-larks, owing for—don’t know how much, besides money paid. Money borrowed, eighty or ninety pounds. Books—forget—say sixpence. Like Falstaff’s ha’pennyworth of bread to all that quantity of sack! Think I paid ready money for all the light reading, and young gent’s books.’ The fire sank lower and lower, and so did the candles, one of which had just gone out, and began to send up a curdling stream of yellow smoke. ‘What a place this is for coals. What a smutty face Nature wears! From the house upwards, all alike,—dull, dusky, and detestable. Pfeu! Smell of fried mutton fat! Now, then, old Coal fire, hold up your head. I’m sleepy myself. This house is more like a hearse than a dwelling-place for live stock. The roadway in front of the house is all of coal-dust; the front of the house is like a sweep’s, it only wants the dangling sign of his “brush.” The window-ledges have a constant layer of black dust over them; so has the top of the porch; so have the chimney-pieces inside the house, where all the little china cups and gimcracks have a round black circle of coal-dust at the bottom. There is always a dark scum over the water of the jug in my bedroom. How I detest this life among the coals! Where’s the great need of them? Why don’t the stupid old world burn wood?’ The fire had by this time sunk to dull red embers and grey ashes, with large dark chasms around and behind. The shadows on the wall were faint, and shifting with the flickering of the last candle, now dying in the socket. Flashley’s eyes were closed, and his arms folded, as he still continued to murmur to himself. Sooth to say, the ale had got into his head. ‘Margery, the housemaid, has large black eyes, with dark rings of coal-grime round them. Her hair is also black—her cap like a mourning mop—and she has worn a black patch on one side of her nose since last Friday, when I gave her a handful from the coal-scuttle for comparing me to the lazy young dog that lay asleep before the fire. Margery Daw!—you shall slide down to the lower regions,—on an inclined plane, as the Useful Knowledge books would say. ‘Ale is a good thing when it is strong; but a coal-mine is all nonsense. Still, they seem to make money by it, and _that’s_ some excuse—some reason for men wasting in work lives which ought to be passed in pleasure. Human time—human——I thought something touched my elbow. ‘Human time should not be passed——why there it came again! I must be dreaming.