"I left my one-time schoolfellow Murkel Minor, with the certainty of work for which I should be paid, and with something like a ray of hope, and oddly enough I did not lament over the strange fortune which had prevented any one from accepting any of my books or poems, but had given me instead the writing of a catalogue of bric-a-brac. There was one thing I often resented in my own mind, and frequently sneered at most bitterly whenever I remembered it; that was the fact that Lal had prophesied that I should become great, and also that I should meet Dick Whittington. Both these imaginary things I regarded now as being utterly unreliable, and looked upon as two ghostly myths of the past. I might have known better. The nervousness from which I suffered, and which I have already alluded to, was becoming so marked that it greatly stood in my way, particularly whenever I had any writing to do. I would fidget, bite my fingers, nibble the pen, break the nibs, a thousand things sooner than deliberately sit down to write. Concentration seemed at times to me wholly impossible. One day, after sacrificing many nibs, and breaking my only ink-bottle, I settled down sufficiently to finish Murkel's catalogue, and received the sum of five pounds for the work. It seemed untold riches to me at the time. As I went homeward through the maze of dirty streets towards where my garret was situated, I had to pass through one where the outside pavement stalls were always heaped up upon either side of the way with every imaginable thing from greengrocery and scrap-iron to old prints and china-ware. "Upon one of these stalls an inkstand immediately attracted my attention, partly from the fact that I had broken my own ink-bottle, and had resolved to buy another, but more particularly because this inkstand appeared to me to be one of the most uncommon receptacles for ink I had ever seen. It was made in what I judged must be some old form of china-ware I never remembered to have seen before, and beneath the dirt which was thickly coated over it I could see that both the modelling and colouring of it were very beautiful. It represented a figure lying upon the ground beside a big tree-stump, which, after the mud should be scraped out of it, was evidently intended to contain ink, and a milestone, when a similar operation had taken place, would doubtless contain one pen; a coloured three-cornered hat flung beside the figure upon the ground was obviously designed to hold a taper. "The inkstand attracted me strangely, and I was so fascinated with it that I could not take my eyes off it. The woman to whom the stall belonged, doubtless spotting a likely customer, asked me how much I would give her for it. I deliberated for some time, as I had not the remotest idea what its value might be in her eyes, so I offered her eighteenpence as a sort of compromise between the inkstand and other articles ticketed upon her stall.