was called 'slightly shop-soiled,' and had been
'marked down' from 8s. 11d. to 4s. 10 1/2d.

Yes, for a youth of sixteen years, I fear it must be admitted that I
was unnaturally parsimonious, and a good deal of what schoolboys used
to call a smug and a swatter. It really was curious, because I do not
recall that I had any ambition to be actually rich. Mr. Smiles and his
_Self Help_ would have left me cold if I had read that classic. I
indulged no Whittingtonian dreams of knighthood, mayoral chains, vast
commercial or financial operations, or anything of that sort. The
things that interested me were largely unreal. I was immensely
appealed to, I remember, by a phase in the career of Charles Reade's
_Griffith Gaunt_, in which that gentleman lived incognito for awhile
in a remote rural inn, and wooed (if he did not actually marry) the
buxom daughter of the house, while his real wife was being accused of
having murdered him. I think that was the way of it. I know the
sojourn in that isolated inn--I pictured its lichen-grown walls; a
place that would be approached quite nearly in the stilly night by
wild woodland creatures--appealed to me as a wholly delightful
episode.

I never had a dream of commercial triumphs. I did not think of fame.
For what was I striving? And why did I so assiduously save? It is not
easy to answer these questions. I find the thing puzzles me a good
deal. There was my means-to-an-end attitude; but what was the precise
end in view? If one comes to that I have been striving all my life
long, and to what end? I know this, that in the midst of my physical
content as a handy lad in a comfortable home, I had at least thought
definitely of my future up to a certain point. I had told myself that
there were two kinds of people in the world: the hewers of wood and
drawers of water, earning a mere living, as I was earning mine, by the
labour of their hands; and the others. I knew very little of what the
others did, and had no very definite plan or desire to follow, myself,
any of their occupations. But I did know that I wished to live in
their division of the community. I wished to be one of those others. I
should be unworthy of my father if I did not presently take my place
among those others. And, I suppose, the only practical steps in that
direction which I knew of and could take were the saving of my wages
and the study of shorthand. I think that was about the way of it. And
if my diligence with regard to