He had given up reading. He had hardly opened a book since his misfortune. This may seem an odd thing to have to record about a gentleman, and to a certain extent a scholar; but so it was. He wanted to lower himself, and he was beginning to succeed. There was an essential honesty in him, which made him hate to appear what he was not; and this feeling, carried to an absurd extent, prevented his taking refuge in the most obvious remedy for all troubles except hunger—books. He did not know, as I do, that determined reading—reading of anything, even the advertisements in a newspaper—will stop all cravings except those of the stomach, and will even soften them; but he guessed it, nevertheless. "Why should I read?" said he. "I must learn to do as the rest of them." And so he did as the rest of them, and "rather loafed away his time than otherwise."
And he was more inclined to "loaf" than usual this day, because he very much dreaded what was to come. And so he dawdled round to St. Peter's Church, and came upon his young friend, playing at fives with the ball he had given him, as energetically as he had before played with the brass button. Shoeblacks are compelled to a great deal of unavoidable "loafing;" but certainly this one loafed rather energetically, for he was hot and frantic in his play.
He was very glad to see Charles. He parted his matted hair from his face, and looked at him admiringly with a pleasant smile; then he suddenly said—
"You was drunk last night, worn't you?"
Charles said, No—that he never got drunk.
"Worn't you really, though?" said the boy; "you look as tho' you had a been. You looks wild about the eyes;" and then he hazarded another theory to account for Charles's appearance, which Charles also negatived emphatically.
"I gave a halpenny for this one," said the boy, showing him the ball, "and I spent the other halpenny." Here he paused, expecting a rebuke, apparently; but Charles nodded kindly at him, and he was encouraged to go on, and to communicate a piece of intelligence with the air of one who assumes that his hearer is au fait with all the movements of the great world, and will be interested.
"Old Biddy Flanigan's dead."
"No! is she?" said Charles, who, of course, had not the wildest idea who she was, but guessed her to be an aged, and probably a dissipated Irishwoman.
"Ah! I believe you," said the boy. "And they was a-waking on her last night, down in our court (he said, "dăŏne in ăŏur cawt"). They waked me sharp enough; but, as for she! she's fast."