beneath the bedclothes, and his old discoloured nose above.
He was thinking the thoughts which usually came into his mind about this
hour--that Mrs. Hughs ought not to scrape the butter off his bread for
breakfast in the way she did; that she ought to take that sixpence off
his rent; that the man who brought his late editions in the cart ought to
be earlier, letting 'that man' get his Pell Mells off before him, when he
himself would be having the one chance of his day; that, sooner than pay
the ninepence which the bootmaker had proposed to charge for resoling
him, he would wait until the summer came 'low class o' feller' as he was,
he'd be glad enough to sole him then for sixpence.

And the high-souled critic, finding these reflections sordid, would have
thought otherwise, perhaps, had he been standing on those feet (now
twitching all by themselves beneath the bedclothes) up to eleven o'clock
the night before, because there were still twelve numbers of the late
edition that nobody would buy. No one knew more surely than Joshua Creed
himself that, if he suffered himself to entertain any large and lofty
views of life, he would infallibly find himself in that building to keep
out of which he was in the habit of addressing to God his only prayer to
speak of. Fortunately, from a boy up, together with a lengthy, oblong,
square-jawed face, he had been given by Nature a single-minded view of
life. In fact, the mysterious, stout tenacity of a soul born in the
neighbourhood of Newmarket could not have been done justice to had he
constitutionally seen--any more than Mr. Stone himself--two things at a
time. The one thing he had seen, for the five years that he had now
stood outside Messrs. Rose and Thorn's, was the workhouse; and, as he
was not going there so long as he was living, he attended carefully to
all little matters of expense in this somewhat sordid way.

While attending thus, he heard a scream. Having by temperament
considerable caution, but little fear, he waited till he heard another,
and then got out of bed. Taking the poker in his hand, and putting on
his spectacles, he hurried to the door. Many a time and oft in old days
had he risen in this fashion to defend the plate of the "Honorable
Bateson" and the Dowager Countess of Glengower from the periodical
attacks of his imagination. He stood with his ancient nightgown flapping
round his still more ancient legs, slightly shivering; then, pulling the
door open,