“A brown, o’ course,” said the urchin, eyeing him sternly.
“Oh yes,” said the boy, “one of those brown coins which are called p-pennies. I am much in-indebted to you for this in-information.”
With a grave smile of thanks the boy lifted his cap and returned again to the steps of the warehouse. After a moment, however, in which he stood in irresolution he limped away along the street. His progress was carefully noted by the urchin, who watched the frail figure solemnly as it proceeded along the crowded pavements of Cannon Street.
“Gawdstrewth!” he exclaimed, spitting with vehemence, and dealing the great horse a further admonitory blow on the neck.
The boy, however, as he limped with his hunger and weariness through the crowd of street-persons who were about him everywhere and who dealt him continual buffets, was under the dominion of an idea. He had gained yet another fragment of practical knowledge by the medium of first-hand experience. He must turn it to account at the first opportunity. He was hungry. That inexorable power in whose hands he was had inflicted that salutary condition upon him in order to make trial of his quality. And what an incomparable sense of power it would confer upon him to feed that hunger for the first time in his life by his own personal skill in the practical sciences!
A hundred yards along the street was another huge block of gloomy warehouses almost identical with the others. It also was furnished with a flight of stone steps and a crane dangling above a door in the second storey. Their similarity, even to the smallest details, enabled the boy to see in the appearance of this second warehouse this same indubitable hand. He sat down as before on the bottom step, and in simple faith proceeded to await the arrival of a second dray drawn by a great horse.
As thus he sat with an exalted patience for that which he knew must come to pass, yet with his limbs trembling so that he could not hold his knees from knocking together, the clock of the cathedral across the street boomed the hour of six. Its august echoes reverberated in his spirit; they filled it with awe; the sense of a remote yet noble kinship overwhelmed him as he sat. He looked across the street with dim eyes; the colossal spire was uplifted sheer, it was lost in the lowering darkness of the sky. The sombre and vast walls of the church seemed to proclaim themselves to his imagination like the voices of heroes upon which it fed. Their ghostliness, for already they were enveloped in the shadows of evening, set his lips again in motion. Involuntarily they began to move to the familiar lines of the Purgatorio:
Era gia l’ ora che volge il disio
ai naviganti, e intenerisce il cuore
lo di ch’ han detto ai dolci amici addio;