e youth and bloom had died out of it.

My mother did not live many days; at her death her income ceased, and I
found myself, at twenty, obliged to begin the world as best I could, the
sole protector of my invalid sister. The first step was to sell our
little home, a pretty cottage at Hempstead, then to take lodgings nearer
the city; after that I set vigorously to work to look for a situation.

Ah, me, that weary task! I wonder if any of my readers ever went quite
alone, friendless, almost helpless, into the great, modern Babylon, to
look for a situation; if so, they will know how to pity me. I spent many
pounds in advertisements; I haunted the agency offices; I answered every
advertisement I read--it seemed all in vain.

My father's regiment was then in India, but I wrote to several of the
officers, who had known and valued him. Then, as a last resource, I
looked up the few friends my mother had.

If there is one thing more dreary than looking for a situation, it is
what is commonly called "hunting up one's friends." I found many, but
some were old and indifferent, others too much engrossed in their own
affairs to have any time to devote to mine. Some shook hands, wished me
well, promised to do all they could to help me, and before I had passed
from their sight forgot my existence.

I gave up my friends. Their help in the hour of need is a beautiful
theory, but very seldom put into practice.

Just as I was growing dull and dispirited, a friend upon whom I had not
called, and whose aid I had not solicited, wrote to me and offered me a
situation as clerk in his office, with a salary of eighty pounds per
annum, to be afterward increased. God send to every weary heart the
comfort this news brought to mine. I ran to Clare with the letter in my
hands.

"Eighty pounds a year, darling!" I cried; "there is a fortune."

We had neither of us ever had much to do with money; we were quite
ignorant of its value, how far it would go, what it would purchase, etc.
It seemed an inexhaustible sum. We had cheap, comfortable apartments in
Holloway--a room for my sister and two smaller rooms for myself. When I
think of her patience, her resignation, her unvarying sweetness, her
constant cheerfulness, my heart does homage to the virtue and goodness
of women.

One fine morning in September I went for the first time to work. The
office of Lawson Brothers was in Lincoln's Inn. The elder brother seldom
if ever appeared; the younger was