grew used to hearing a sentence that struck at his heart. Perhaps it was the tone it was uttered in; perhaps the looks of discouragement and depression that went with it.

p. vi

‘Fanny, I shall have to write to my father.’

It served to make the little boy very p. viiprecocious about money. In a family perennially short of it he learned its essentialness early. He knew too, that he was a dreadfully expensive child. His stepfather paid forty pounds for his winter’s tutoring, not to speak of an additional outlay on a dying Prussian officer who taught him German with the aid of a pocket-knife stuck down his throat to give him the right accent. It was with consternation that he once heard his stepfather say in a voice of tragedy: ‘Good Heavens, Fanny, we are spending ten pounds a week on food alone!’

p. vii

The little boy, under the stress of this financial urgency, decided to go into business, finding a capital opening in the Hotel Belvidere, where a hundred programmes were required weekly for the Saturday night concerts. A gentleman with a black beard, who was in charge of these arrangements, willingly offered to pay two francs fifty centimes for each set of programmes. The little boy was afraid of the gentleman p. viiiwith the black beard; he was a formidable gentleman, with a formidable manner, and he was very exacting about spelling. The gentleman with the black beard attached an inordinate importance to spelling. The gentleman with the black beard was wholly unable to make allowances for the trifling mistakes that will occur in even the best-managed of printing-offices. If the little boy printed: ‘’Twas in Trofolgar’s Bay . . . sung by Mr. Edwin Smith,’ the black-bearded gentleman had no mercy in sending that poor little boy back to do it all over again. But he paid promptly—a severe man, but extremely honourable. There were charity-bazaars too, public invitations, announcements, letter-heads, all bringing grist to the mill. The ‘Elegy for Some Lead Soldiers’ was brought out, and sold for a penny. Once there was a colossal order for a thousand lottery tickets.

p. viii

The little boy’s ambitions soared. He wrote and printed a tiny book of eight p. ixpages, entitled ‘Black Canyon, or Life in the Far West,’ in which he used all the ‘cuts’ he had somehow accumulated with his type—the story conforming to the illustrations instead of the more common-place way of the illustrations conforming to the text. This work can 

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