to do the things I wished, and which I might have done had a little money
helped me; endless instances of homely pleasure and contentment curtailed
or forbidden by narrow means. I have lost friends merely through the
constraints of my position; friends I might have made have remained
strangers to me; solitude of the bitter kind, the solitude which is
enforced at times when mind or heart longs for companionship, often
cursed my life solely because I was poor. I think it would scarce be an
exaggeration to say that there is no moral good which has not to be paid
for in coin of the realm.

"Poverty," said Johnson again, "is so great an evil, and pregnant with so
much temptation, so much misery, that I cannot but earnestly enjoin you
to avoid it."

For my own part, I needed no injunction to that effort of avoidance. Many
a London garret knows how I struggled with the unwelcome chamber-fellow.
I marvel she did not abide with me to the end; it is a sort of
inconsequence in Nature, and sometimes makes me vaguely uneasy through
nights of broken sleep.



VI.


How many more springs can I hope to see? A sanguine temper would say ten
or twelve; let me dare to hope humbly for five or six. That is a great
many. Five or six spring-times, welcomed joyously, lovingly watched from
the first celandine to the budding of the rose; who shall dare to call it
a stinted boon? Five or six times the miracle of earth reclad, the