'Stealing time, Nickperry, stealing time! You an' me'll fall out, my
friend, if you can't manage to keep proper working hours.
Applicatiousness is all very well, but stealing time after tea is
gluttish and greedular, and must be put down with an iron hand, with
an iron hand, Nickperry. Tssp! Howzashorthandgetnon?'

Before expelling the last interrogative omnibus word, he would clench
one fat fist and knead the air downward with it, to illustrate the
process of putting down greediness with an iron hand.

I saw comparatively little of him, of course, owing to his
preoccupation with business, his own and that of Dursley and most of
its inhabitants; but we were excellent good friends, and it was rarely
that he missed his Sunday morning walk round the whole place with me,
when my week's work would be passed in more or less humorous review,
and the programme for the next week discussed. After this tour of
inspection I generally went to church, and the afternoon I almost
invariably spent in my room over the packing-case. That is a period
which many people give to letter-writing, and it is queer to recall
the fact that, so far as I can remember, I had written only two
letters in my life up to this period--one to a Sydney bookseller,
whose address I got from Mr. Perkins, and one to Mr. Rawlence, the
Sydney artist, to tell him of my present position, and to say that I
had made a start upon shorthand. His kindly and encouraging reply was,
I think, the first letter I ever received through the post. But I now
began to write letters by the score, addressed to imaginary
correspondents, and based in style upon my studies of correspondence
in various books. These epistles, however, all ended their brief
careers under the kindling wood in Mrs. Gabbitas's kitchen grate.

'Applicatious and industrial, with bettermentatious ambitions,' Mr.
Perkins had said of me within a few moments of our first meeting, and
at this period I think I justified the sense of his comment. My daily
work was pleasant enough, of course, healthy and not fatiguing. Still,
it was perhaps odd in a youth of my age that I should have had no
desire for recreation or amusement. My study of shorthand did not
interest me in the faintest degree; but I was greatly interested by my
growing mastery of it, because I thought of the mastery of shorthand,
as Mr. Rawlence had described it, as a very valuable means to an end,
to various ends. I thought of it, in short, as the k