ass?' For it was a
special occasion. I don't know what. It may have been my birthday.

'Twopence-halfpenny,' says the landlord, 'is the price of the Genuine
Stunning ale.'

'Then,' says I, producing the money, 'just draw me a glass of the
Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.'

The landlord looked at me in return over the bar, from head to foot,
with a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the beer,
looked round the screen and said something to his wife. She came out
from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying
me. Here we stand, all three, before me now. The landlord in his
shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame; his wife looking
over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them
from outside the partition. They asked me a good many questions; as,
what my name was, how old I was, where I lived, how I was employed,
and how I came there. To all of which, that I might commit nobody, I
invented, I am afraid, appropriate answers. They served me with the ale,
though I suspect it was not the Genuine Stunning; and the landlord's
wife, opening the little half-door of the bar, and bending down, gave
me my money back, and gave me a kiss that was half admiring and half
compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the
scantiness of my resources or the difficulties of my life. I know that
if a shilling were given me by Mr. Quinion at any time, I spent it in
a dinner or a tea. I know that I worked, from morning until night, with
common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I lounged about the
streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for
the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken
of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.

Yet I held some station at Murdstone and Grinby's too. Besides that Mr.
Quinion did what a careless man so occupied, and dealing with a thing so
anomalous, could, to treat me as one upon a different footing from the
rest, I never said, to man or boy, how it was that I came to be there,
or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was there. That I
suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew
but I. How much I suffered, it is, as I have said already, utterly
beyond my power to tell. But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work.
I knew from the first, that, if I c