The result was a warm intimacy, in the course of which he told me his little history and that of his daughter—stepdaughter he called her—Ruth.
“Mine’s a curious trade to have taken to,” he said, “and I had plenty of up-hill work, but it has grown to be profitable. Things were at a low ebb with me when I took it up, while now—”
There, I won’t boast, only say that I’m thankful for it. Poverty comes in at the door, and love flies out of the window, so they say; but that’s all nonsense, or else your poor people would be always miserable, while according to my experience your poor man is often more lighthearted than the man with thousands.
I was at my wits’ end for something to do, and sat nibbling my nails one day, and grumbling horribly.
“Don’t go on like that, Tom,” says my wife; “things might be worse.”
“How?” I said.
“Why, we might have Luke at home, and he is doing well.”
Luke’s our boy, you know, and we had got him into a merchant’s office, where he seemed likely to stay; but I was in a grumbling fit then, and there was a clickety-click noise going on in the next room which fidgeted me terribly.
“Things can’t be worse,” I said angrily; and I was going to prove myself in the wrong by making my wife cry, when there was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” I said, and a fellow-lodger put in his head.