ho would work for him at starvation wages. _My_ one object in life was
to find somebody who would give me an asylum over my head. Without a
single sympathy in common--without a vestige of feeling of any sort,
hostile or friendly, growing up between us on either side--without
wishing each other good-night when we parted on the house stairs, or
good-morning when we met at the shop counter, we lived alone in that
house, strangers from first to last, for two whole years. A dismal
existence for a lad of my age, was it not? You are a clergyman and a
scholar--surely you can guess what made the life endurable to me?"

Mr. Brock remembered the well-worn volumes which had been found in the
usher's bag. "The books made it endurable to you," he said.

The eyes of the castaway kindled with a new light.

"Yes!" he said, "the books--the generous friends who met me without
suspicion--the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of
my life that I can look back on with something like pride are the years
I passed in the miser's house. The only unalloyed pleasure I have ever
tasted is the pleasure that I found for myself on the miser's shelves.
Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer
days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the
draught. There were few customers to serve, for the books were mostly of
the solid and scholarly kind. No responsibilities rested on me, for the
accounts were kept by my master, and only the small sums of money were
suffered to pass through my hands. He soon found out enough of me to
know that my honesty was to be trusted, and that my patience might be
counted on, treat me as he might. The one insight into _his_ character
which I obtained, on my side, widened the distance between us to its
last limits. He was a confirmed opium-eater in secret--a prodigal in
laudanum, though a miser in all besides. He never confessed his frailty,
and I never told him I had found it out. He had his pleasure apart from
me, and I had my pleasure apart from _him_. Week after week, month after
month, there we sat, without a friendly word ever passing between us--I,
alone with my book at the counter; he, alone with his ledger in the
parlor, dimly visible to me through the dirty window-pane of the glass
door, sometimes poring over his figures, sometimes lost and motionless
for hours in the ecstasy of his opium trance. Time passed, and made no
impression on us; the seasons of