here.

In the dim local yokel mind Paul was a failure, and he knew it. He had
gone away, and his brothers and sisters had magnified his successes,
and he was back again, a refugee, as it were, from a world which he had
apparently misused. He was taciturn and gloomy, and, to the fancy of
those who held themselves his equals and superiors, was disposed to give
himself airs. Two years with Darco had made him something of an epicure.
He had grown to hate soiled hands and coarse clothes, and the trivial
talk of people who only lived for trifles. He suffered doubly,
therefore, as one who had failed, and as one who took the airs which
belong only to success. Life was not happy for a while.

The 'stand-by' of Armstrong's poor business was the printing of a
certain coarse label from stereotype plates, and, when there was nothing
else to be done, this would be taken in hand for unbroken days together.
It was an operation as purely mechanical as any in the world, and the
thoughts of the worker had time and chance to roam anywhere. Paul made
hundreds of verses. The clean sheet set home to the pins, frisket and
tympan down, the turn of the drum-handle, the pull of the bar, the
backward turn of the drum, frisket and tympan up, and the printed sheet
laid on the ordered pile-day in, day out, ten hours a day, the same
things done and done again. Hands growing into horn; muscles swelling
like a blacksmith's. A healthy life enough, with a rough, plain diet,
and yet a purgatory in its way, with prospect and horizon bound.

In a year or more they widened, for Paul had set up for himself
something of a study in the old lumber-room, where on a broken
table, with an upturned box for a chair, and a candle stuck in a
gingerbeer-bottle, he wrote down the verses he had hammered out during
the day, and he began stealthily to send these here and there to
magazine editors, who sometimes sent them back and sometimes printed
them, but never seemed to dream of payment, until at last one offered
him two guineas for a long Christmas story in rhyme, and he began to
see a hope of escape from the treadmill round. He set to work on a
blank-verse play, and spent the greater part of a year on it, and was
prepared to find himself enthroned with Shakespeare. He put his drama
into type, a page at a time, pulling but a single impression of each
page, and distributing the type jealously before he went to bed, and
jealously hiding his pages. And when it was all com