“Give me my ’bacco and pipe off the chimney-piece.”
I handed them to him, and waited patiently while he filled and lighted his pipe, and then all at once, along with a puff of smoke, he exclaimed:
“No, I sha’n’t. Fighting’s all blackguardism, as I know as well as most men. I’ve had the taking up of some of the beauties as go in for it, and beauties they are. I don’t say as if I was you I wouldn’t give that Master Jem Smith an awful crack for himself if he meddled with me again; but I should do it when I was in a passion, and when he’d hurt me. You’ll hit as hard again then, and serve him right. Now let’s have a turn at spelling.”
We did “have a turn at spelling,” and I dictated while Revitts wrote, varying the task with bits of advice to me—absurd enough, some of them, while others were as shrewd and full of common-sense.
By that time I had rapidly begun to fish up odds and ends of experience, such as stood me in good stead, and, in spite of what was really little better than contemptible persecution on the overseer’s part, I was making some little way at the printing-office.
I shall not soon forget the feeling of pride with which on the first Friday night I heard my name called out by a business-like clerk with a book, after he had summoned everyone in the room, and received from him a little paper-bag containing my wages.
“You haven’t been full time, Grace,” he said, entering the sum paid in a book; “but the firm said I was to pay you for the week, as you were a beginner.”
As soon as I thought I was unobserved, I counted out seven shillings, a sum that showed that I was a little favoured, for honestly I believe that I was not worth that amount to my employers.
Hardly had I made sure of my good fortune than I had a visit from Jem Smith, who came up grinning.
“Now, then,” he said, “old Grim’s gone for the night, and you’ve got to come down and pay your footing.”