The “Rocket” Newspaper Company, Limited.
The reader may imagine that the walk our two heroes took Citywards that Monday morning was not a very cheerful one. It seemed like walking out of one life into another. Behind, like a dream, were the joyous, merry days spent at Garden Vale and Wilderham, with no care for the future, and no want for the present. Before them, still more like a dream, lay the prospect of their new work, with all its anxiety, and drudgery, and weariness, and the miserable eighteen shillings a week it promised them; and, equally wretched at the present moment, there was the vision of their desolate mother, alone in the Dull Street lodgings, where they had just left her, unable at the last to hide the misery with which she saw her two boys start out into the pitiless world.
The boys walked for some time in silence; then Horace said,—
“Old man, I hope, whatever they do, they’ll let us be together at this place.”
“We needn’t expect any such luck,” said Reginald. “It wouldn’t be half so bad if they would.”
“You know,” said Horace, “I can’t help hoping they’ll take us as clerks, at least. They must know we’re educated, and more fit for that sort of work than—”
“Than doing common labourer’s work,” said Reg. “Rather! If they’d put us to some of the literary work, you know, Horace—editing, or correcting, or reporting, or that sort of thing, I could stand that. There are plenty of swells who began like that. I’m pretty well up in classics, you know, and—well, they might be rather glad to have some one who was.”
Horace sighed.
“Richmond spoke as if we were to be taken on as ordinary workmen.”
“Oh, Richmond’s an ass,” said Reg, full of his new idea; “he knows nothing about it. I tell you, Horace, they wouldn’t be such idiots as to waste our education when they could make use of it. Richmond only knows the manager, but the editor is the chief man, after all.”