but he held his own.
He would run away, he declared, he would drown himself, he would do
anything rather than submit to that. So finally he was turned into the
ramshackle old printing-office, where all his elder brothers had been
before him, and learned to sort pie, and to roll at press, and to
sweep the floors, and to blow old dusty type-cases clean. He wore
a brown-paper apron tied about his waist with string, and lived so
obscured in printer's ink, for which he seemed to have a natural
affinity, that he hardly looked like a white boy at all.

He was still a liar, but he told his lies on paper now, and hid them. He
told them in prose and verse--prose which was measled with 'Oh's,' and
'Alas's,' and full of great windblown phrases of bombast, like inflated
bladders, each with one little parched pea of meaning to rattle inside
it The verse was mainly such as might have been written by a moderately
illiterate absurd old man who had found life a vanity, and had deserved
his discovery.

There was one idle and worthless journeyman in the ramshackle office,
and one only. He kept the place like a pigsty, and the floor was
littered with boards on which unlocked formes of type fell about into
confusion. Paul could pick his way through these blindfold, and many and
many a night in the dark he raged out his verses, marching to and fro
with the four big dim windows staring dully at him, wall-eyed with
countless paper patches, seen as darker blots on the darkness.

One night he was there in hiding. He had played truant from
Sunday-school and chapel, and had been all day in the fields, hungry,
but happy beyond all dreaming. And, oh! the Sundays! the dreary, bestial
days, with Sunday-school at half-past nine and chapel at eleven, and
Sunday-school at half-past two and chapel at half-past six and family
prayers at nine, and bed at half-past nine, and books forbidden, and
speech a crime, and whistling a felony. Paul had broken loose, and knew
not what to look for, and cared little for the hour. For his head was
full of verses, and his heart was full of the summer day, and for
the first time in his life he had gone to Nature, and forgotten his
thrice-thirty-times copied emotions, and had dared to speak in his own
voice. The lines he had made that day were unutterably sacred and sweet
to him. The dreaming Solitary, staring down the gorge, heard the
boy's awestruck whisper, and, forgetting all the rest of the verses,
remembered this on