as
hard enough to me), but it was harder to get over. However, she was
pacified to it at last, and the separation betwixt us was settled. How
it cut up both of us when it took place, and when I left her at the door
in the dark of an evening, I don't tell. But I know this; remembering
that night, I shall never pass that same establishment without a
heartache and a swelling in the throat; and I couldn't put you up the
best of lots in sight of it with my usual spirit,--no, not even the gun,
nor the pair of spectacles,--for five hundred pound reward from the
Secretary of State for the Home Department, and throw in the honour of
putting my legs under his mahogany arterwards.

Still, the loneliness that followed in the cart was not the old
loneliness, because there was a term put to it, however long to look
forward to; and because I could think, when I was anyways down, that she
belonged to me and I belonged to her. Always planning for her coming
back, I bought in a few months' time another cart, and what do you think
I planned to do with it? I'll tell you. I planned to fit it up with
shelves and books for her reading, and to have a seat in it where I could
sit and see her read, and think that I had been her first teacher. Not
hurrying over the job, I had the fittings knocked together in contriving
ways under my own inspection, and here was her bed in a berth with
curtains, and there was her reading-table, and here was her writing-desk,
and elsewhere was her books in rows upon rows, picters and no picters,
bindings and no bindings, gilt-edged and plain, just as I could pick 'em
up for her in lots up and down the country, North and South and West and
East, Winds liked best and winds liked least, Here and there and gone
astray, Over the hills and far away. And when I had got together pretty
well as many books as the cart would neatly hold, a new scheme come into
my head, which, as it turned out, kept my time and attention a good deal
employed, and helped me over the two years' stile.

Without being of an awaricious temper, I like to be the owner of things.
I shouldn't wish, for instance, to go partners with yourself in the Cheap
Jack cart. It's not that I mistrust you, but that I'd rather know it was
mine. Similarly, very likely you'd rather know it was yours. Well! A
kind of a jealousy began to creep into my mind when I reflected that all
those books would have been read by other people long before they was
read b