Another friend, and the last whom I shall name, was a young man named Clark. He was lame, and had been so from childhood. His father was a tradesman, working hard from early morning till late at night, and burdened with a number of children. The boy Richard, shut out from the companionship of his fellows, had a great love of books. When he left school his father did not know what to do with him—in fact there was only one occupation open to him, and that was clerical work of one kind or another. At last he got a place in a house in Fleet Street, which did a large business in those days in sending newspapers into the country. His whole occupation all day long was to write addresses, and for this he received twenty-five shillings a week, his hours being from nine o’clock till seven. The office in which he sat was crowded, and in order to squeeze the staff into the smallest space, rent being dear, a gallery had been run round the wall about four feet from the ceiling. This was provided with desks and gas lamps, and up there Clark sat, artificial light being necessary four days out of five. He came straight from the town in which his father lived to Fleet Street, and once settled in it there seemed no chance of change for the better. He knew what his father’s struggles were; he could not go back to him, and he had not the energy to attempt to lift himself. It is very doubtful too whether he could have succeeded in achieving any improvement, whatever his energy might have been. He had got lodgings in Newcastle Street, and to these he returned in the evening, remaining there alone with his little library, and seldom moving out of doors. He was unhealthy constitutionally, and his habits contributed to make him more so. Everything which he saw which was good seemed only to sharpen the contrast between himself and his lot, and his reading was a curse to him rather than a blessing. I sometimes wished that he had never inherited any love whatever for what is usually considered to be the Best, and that he had been endowed with an organisation coarse and commonplace, like that of his colleagues. If he went into company which suited him, or read anything which interested him, it seemed as if the ten hours of the gallery in Fleet Street had been made thereby only the more insupportable, and his habitual mood was one of despondency, so that his fellow clerks who knew his tastes not unnaturally asked what was the use of them if they only made him wretched; and they were more than ever convinced that in their amusements lay true happiness. Habit, which is the saviour of most of us, the opiate which dulls the otherwise unbearable miseries of life, only served to make Clark more sensitive. The monotony of that perpetual address-copying was terrible. He has told me with a kind of shame what an effect it had upon him—that sometimes for days he would feed upon the prospect of the most childish trifle because