nary things I regarded now as being
utterly unreliable, and looked upon as two ghostly myths of the past.
I might have known better. The nervousness from which I suffered, and
which I have already alluded to, was becoming so marked that it greatly
stood in my way, particularly whenever I had any writing to do. I
would fidget, bite my fingers, nibble the pen, break the nibs, a
thousand things sooner than deliberately sit down to write.
Concentration seemed at times to me wholly impossible. One day, after
sacrificing many nibs, and breaking my only ink-bottle, I settled down
sufficiently to finish Murkel's catalogue, and received the sum of five
pounds for the work. It seemed untold riches to me at the time. As I
went homeward through the maze of dirty streets towards where my garret
was situated, I had to pass through one where the outside pavement
stalls were always heaped up upon either side of the way with every
imaginable thing from greengrocery and scrap-iron to old prints and
china-ware.

"Upon one of these stalls an inkstand immediately attracted my
attention, partly from the fact that I had broken my own ink-bottle,
and had resolved to buy another, but more particularly because this
inkstand appeared to me to be one of the most uncommon receptacles for
ink I had ever seen. It was made in what I judged must be some old
form of china-ware I never remembered to have seen before, and beneath
the dirt which was thickly coated over it I could see that both the
modelling and colouring of it were very beautiful. It represented a
figure lying upon the ground beside a big tree-stump, which, after the
mud should be scraped out of it, was evidently intended to contain ink,
and a milestone, when a similar operation had taken place, would
doubtless contain one pen; a coloured three-cornered hat flung beside
the figure upon the ground was obviously designed to hold a taper.

"The inkstand attracted me strangely, and I was so fascinated with it
that I could not take my eyes off it. The woman to whom the stall
belonged, doubtless spotting a likely customer, asked me how much I
would give her for it. I deliberated for some time, as I had not the
remotest idea what its value might be in her eyes, so I offered her
eighteenpence as a sort of compromise between the inkstand and other
articles ticketed upon her stall.

"'Give us two bob, and it's yours,' suggested the stall woman.
However, I was firm, and was upon the point