daylight. Then we seize him, and with
that touch we two are one. It is the birth of self-consciousness.

Hitherto he had slept at the back of his mother's bed, but to-night she
could not have him there, the place being occupied, and rather sulkily
he consented to lie crosswise at her feet, undressing by the feeble fire
and taking care, as he got into bed, not to look at the usurper. His
mother watched him furtively, and was relieved to read in his face that
he had no recollection of ever having slept at the foot of a bed before.
But soon after he fell asleep he awoke, and was afraid to move lest his
father should kick him. He opened his eyes stealthily, and this was
neither the room nor the bed he had expected to see.

The floor was bare save for a sheepskin beside the bed. Tommy always
stood on the sheepskin while he was dressing because it was warm to the
feet, though risky, as your toes sometimes caught in knots in it. There
was a deal table in the middle of the floor with some dirty crockery
on it and a kettle that would leave a mark, but they had been left there
by Shovel's old girl, for Mrs. Sandys usually kept her house clean. The
chairs were of the commonest, and the press door would not remain shut
unless you stuck a knife between its halves; but there, was a gay blue
wardrobe, spotted white where Tommy's mother had scraped off the mud
that had once bespattered it during a lengthy sojourn at the door of a
shop; and on the mantelpiece was a clock in a little brown and yellow
house, and on the clock a Bible that had been in Thrums. But what Tommy
was proudest of was his mother's kist, to which the chests of Londoners
are not to be compared, though like it in appearance. On the inside of
the lid of this kist was pasted, after a Thrums custom, something that
his mother called her marriage lines, which she forced Shovel's mother
to come up and look at one day, when that lady had made an innuendo
Tommy did not understand, and Shovel's mother had looked, and though she
could not read, was convinced, knowing them by the shape.

Tommy lay at the foot of the bed looking at this room, which was his
home now, and trying to think of the other one, and by and by the fire
helped him by falling to ashes, when darkness came in, and packing the
furniture in grotesque cloths, removed it piece by piece, all but the
clock. Then the room took a new shape. The fireplace was over there
instead of here, the torn yellow blind gave way