"I must say it: every day seems too long, every hour goes too slowly, until I can get at my life's work. This waiting for it kills me."
"My friend, do you call this waiting?" laughed the German. "Was it waiting and doing nothing that changed you from—"
"But think," interrupted Dick, "of what ought to have-been. Some day—some day I will get my hand to the plough, you'll see! At least," a little ashamed of the seeming conceit, "I hope you will."
"And what makes you care?"
"I think it's born in us all to like to be active—to be doing something. Indeed, it's about the only legacy my poor parents left me. It may be, for I know nothing of them, that they were just the same as other people, out of whom bitter poverty has taken all pride and ambition; but I can't think it, somehow."
"Do you really know nothing of them?"
"Nothing. I have a little sealed box, with an injunction on the outside of it that I am not to open it until I am of age. I don't know where I first got it, nor from whom it came. It may be some trick to tease me for years, and disappoint me at last, for all I know; and still I have always kept it, for it is all I have. And I think it came from them."
"It may tell you something wonderful," said his visitor, laughing. For it was easy for him to understand that some young mother, who even in her poverty had found the means of reading and believing stones of princes in disguise, and countesses in cellars, disowned and disinherited, all for true love's sake, had made a mystery of leaving a lock of her hair, and perhaps a cheap wedding-ring, to her boy; and he could not forbear a little ridicule of the folly. "It may tell you something wonderful. If it gives you possession of half of New York, don't forget your friends, will you, Dick?" And then, buttoned up to his chin, and with his cap covering half his face, and looking just like Santa Claus, Carl Stoffs bundled his cherished flute under his arm, and obediently went home to his wife.
Dick lingered a moment, after he left, before closing the door. The room was not wholly his own; but his companion had a father and a mother in New Jersey, and he had gone home to them, with something in his pockets for the children's Christmas; so for that night Dick was in undisputed possession. The passages were dark and cold; the snow had got through some of the broken windows, and lay in several little hills on the entry floor; the sash rattled, and Dick shivered, as he stood irresolute at the door of his room. But the irresolution did not last long. He bundled up, as well as his scanty wardrobe permitted, closed the door firmly behind him, and went down the creaking, broken stairs, and through the dreary passages, where he could see the snow huddling up to the dark window-panes, as if it were a white bird trying to get in and beating its wings against the dirty glass. Dick had not far to walk, after leaving the house, before he found that which he had come out to find—somebody without a shelter from the storm. And I should not wonder if any night, however bitter and cold, that you or I should take a notion to go out on the same errand, we should not have to go far for equal success, and that even if we started from the most delightful dwelling-place in all New York.
Under the remains of some broken steps, or more truly by the side of them, for they were too broken to shelter a kitten, two dark figures were lying close together. In one of the pauses of the storm, when the street-lamp had a chance to shine a little, Dick could see that the figures were those of two boys asleep. He did not wait long to rouse them. One woke up at once, cross, and, if I must tell the truth, with some very wicked words on his lips.