How many times had he not gone in thought
over those stores of treasure while he was parted from them! How many
times since they had come back to him had he not pondered with a slow
but deathless anger on the absence of a certain shirt, which he could
have sworn had been amongst them.
But now he lay in bed waiting to hear the clock go off, with his old
bristly chin beneath the bedclothes, and his old discoloured nose above.
He was thinking the thoughts which usually came into his mind about this
hour--that Mrs. Hughs ought not to scrape the butter off his bread for
breakfast in the way she did; that she ought to take that sixpence off
his rent; that the man who brought his late editions in the cart ought
to be earlier, letting 'that man' get his Pell Mells off before him,
when he himself would be having the one chance of his day; that, sooner
than pay the ninepence which the bootmaker had proposed to charge for
resoling him, he would wait until the summer came 'low class o' feller'
as he was, he'd be glad enough to sole him then for sixpence.
And the high-souled critic, finding these reflections sordid, would
have thought otherwise, perhaps, had he been standing on those feet (now
twitching all by themselves beneath the bedclothes) up to eleven o'clock
the night before, because there were still twelve numbers of the late
edition that nobody would buy.
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