as I could, at a salary, I think, of six shillings a week. I am not
clear whether it was six or seven. I am inclined to believe, from my
uncertainty on this head, that it was six at first, and seven
afterward. At any rate, the offer was accepted very willingly by my
father and mother, and on a Monday morning I went down to the blacking
warehouse to begin my business life.

It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such
an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the
poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had
compassion enough on me--a child of singular abilities, quick, eager,
delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally--to suggest that something
might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at
any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one
made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could
hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age,
distinguished at a grammar school, and going to Cambridge.

Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the
dinner-hour, from twelve to one, I think it was, every day. But an
arrangement so incompatible with counting-house business soon died
away, from no fault of his or mine; and for the same reason, my small
work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors,
paste-pot, and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the recess
in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small
work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors, and paste-pots,
downstairs. It was not long before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy
whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently believed to have been
christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long afterward again, to
Mr. Sweedlepipe, in "Martin Chuzzlewit"), worked generally side by