ild of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and
soon hurt, bodily or mentally--to suggest that something might have been
spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common
school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My
father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more
so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school,
and going to Cambridge.

"The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the
way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house,
abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its
wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old gray
rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and
scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of
the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The
counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and
the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My
work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of
oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a
string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it
looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a
certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection,
I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more
pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on
similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap,
on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string
and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of
using his name, long afterwards, in _Oliver Twist_.

"Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the
dinner-hour; from twelve to one, I think it was; every day. But an
arrangement so incompatible with counting-house business soon died away,
from no fault of his or mine; and, for the same reason, my small
work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors,
paste-pot, and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the recess
in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small
work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors, and paste-pots,
down-stairs. It was not long before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy
whose name was