with a well-stored mind, life is interesting on a piece of bread and a
cup of tea. I know. If it were not for you and your mother I should
not trouble."

And yet at that time our fortunes were at their brightest, so far as I
remember them; and when they were dark again he was full of fresh
hope, planning, scheming, dreaming again. It was never acting. A
worse actor never trod this stage on which we fret. His occasional
attempts at a cheerfulness he did not feel inevitably resulted in our
all three crying in one another's arms. No; it was only when things
were going well that experience came to his injury. Child of
misfortune, he ever rose, Antaeus-like, renewed in strength from
contact with his mother.

Nor must it be understood that his despondent moods, even in time of
prosperity, were oft recurring. Generally speaking, as he himself
said, he was full of confidence. Already had he fixed upon our new
house in Guilford Street, then still a good residential quarter; while
at the same time, as he would explain to my mother, sufficiently
central for office purposes, close as it was to Lincoln and Grey's Inn
and Bedford Row, pavements long worn with the weary footsteps of the
Law's sad courtiers.

"Poplar," said my father, "has disappointed me. It seemed a good
idea--a rapidly rising district, singularly destitute of solicitors.
It ought to have turned out well, and yet somehow it hasn't."

"There have been a few come," my mother reminded him.

"Of a sort," admitted my father; "a criminal lawyer might gather