asked inside the doors of the great house where Lancelot’s days were passed, and I did not feel any injustice in the matter. I was only a mercer’s son, while Lancelot derived of gentlefolk, and it never entered into my mind to question the existing order of things, or to wish to force my way into places where I was not wanted. Excellent gentlemen on the other side of the Atlantic have made very different opinions popular from the opinions that prevailed with me in my youth. Indeed, I myself have now been long used to associate with the great folk of the earth, and have found them in all essential matters very much like other men. I have had the honour of including more than one king amongst my acquaintances, and have liked some and not liked others, just as if they were plain Tom or Harry. But in [Pg 14]the days of my youth I should have as soon expected to be welcomed at St. James’s as to be welcomed in the great house where Lancelot’s uncle lived. [Pg 14] [Pg 15] [Pg 15] CHAPTER III THE ALEHOUSE BY THE RIVER. Three years after I went to learn under Mr. Davies, of Cliff Street, my father died. I remember with a kind of terror still, through all these years, when death of every kind has been so familiar to me, how the news of that death came upon me. I had no realisation of what death meant till then. I had heard of people dying, of course; had watched the black processions creeping, plumed and solemn, along the streets to the churchyard; had noted how in any circle of friends now one and now another falls away and returns to earth. I knew that all must die, that I must die myself, as I knew a lesson got by heart which has little meaning to the unawakened ear. But now it came on me with such a stabbing knowledge that for a little while I was almost crazy with the grief and the fear. But the sorrow, like all sorrows, lessened with [Pg 16]time. There was my mother to cheer; there was my schooling to keep; there was the shop to look after. [Pg 16] My father had thriven well enough to lay by a small store, but my mother kept the shop on, partly for the sake of my father, whose pride it was, partly because it gave her
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