end of the day.

"I may say that these pence I had procured with so much toil were
always expended in the public-house by both the man and his wife who
were supposed at that time to provide me with the weird accommodation
they were pleased to call home. My particular portion of this edifice
was a dirty mat by way of a bed, which I shared with a rough-haired
terrier dog called Sam. We two, Sam and I, were roofed in with many
panes of broken glass in a species of outhouse which may at one time
have formed a small conservatory. It must have been a hopeless
failure, I am sure, as a conservatory, for I cannot imagine anything
growing in it at all.

"One thing I am very certain of, I should never have grown either, but
should most likely have withered and died in it had I remained, like my
possible predecessors the plants, a few blackened and withered sticks
of which could still be seen in some broken red flower-pots upon a
shelf out of my reach. How these people came to have charge of me I
shall never know, but I have sometimes believed, from odds and ends of
conversation they let drop when they were quarrelling, which they were
always doing, that my real father and mother had died when I was a tiny
mite.

"The woman, who seemed at one time to have been better off, was left a
sum of money to bring me up, as no relations appeared to claim me. At
this time the woman was single, and had not met the man she afterwards
married, the man who used to beat me so cruelly. Whether she spent all
the money left for me, or whether they both spent it, appears to be of
little consequence; anyway, once it was gone I was regarded with black
looks as an encumbrance, and turned out into the streets to make some
money, or do something for my board and lodging, as they expressed it.
I have already told you what the lodging was like. Well, the board
part of it corresponded to the rest of the picture in every way.
Crusts of old dry bread, which they couldn't eat themselves, did for me
and the dog, sometimes a little milk, varied by an occasional awful
form of hard cake which the woman cooked, and which was impossible to
eat unless first soaked in something. In the long hours of waiting
between selling the newspapers I learned to spell, and then to read,
very slowly at first, but still I learned. Then one of the men
employed at the newspaper office I collected papers from, although I
should imagine a very poor man himself, found a few pe