die here six months sooner nor if yer worked in the room below.
Concentrated essence of man's flesh is this here as you're a-breathing.
Cellar workroom we calls Rheumatic Ward, acause of the damp. Ground
floor's Fever Ward--your nose'd tell yer why if you opened the back
windy. First floor's Ashmy Ward--don't you hear 'um now through the
cracks in the boards, apuffing away like a nest of young locomotives?
And this here most august and uppercrust cock-loft is the Consumptive
Hospital. First you begins to cough, then you proceeds to expectorate,
and then when you've sufficiently covered the poor dear shivering backs
of the hairystocracy--

Die, die, die,
Away you fly,
Your soul is in the sky!

as the hinspired Shakespeare wittily remarks."

And the ribald lay down on his back, stretched himself out, and
pretended to die in a fit of coughing, which last was, alas! no
counterfeit, while poor I, shocked and bewildered, let my tears fall
fast upon my knees.

I never told my mother into what pandemonium I had fallen, but from that
time my great desire was to get knowledge. I fancied that getting
knowledge I should surely get wisdom, and books, I thought, would tell
me all I needed.

That was how it was I came to know Sandy Mackaye, whose old book-shop I
used to pass on my walk homeward. One evening, as I was reading one of
the books on his stall, the old man called me in and asked me abruptly
my name, and trade, and family.

I told him all, and confessed my love of books. And Mackaye encouraged
me, and taught me Latin, and soon had me to lodge in his old shop, for
my mother in her stern religion would not have me at home because I
could not believe in the Christianity which I heard preached in the
Baptist chapel.

_II.--I Move Among the Gentlefolks_

The death of our employer threw many of us out of work, for the son who
succeeded to the business determined to go ahead with the times, and to
that end decided to go in for the "show-trade"; which meant an
alteration in the premises, the demolition of the work-rooms, and the
giving out of the work to be made up at the men's own homes.

Mackaye would have me stay with him.

"Ye'll just mind the shop, and dust the books whiles," he said.

But this I would not do, for I thought the old man could not afford to
keep me in addition to himself. Then he suggested that I should go to
Cambridge and see my cousin, with a view to getting the poems published