4 wastes
3 wosh clothes
2 onion sutes Mr Gishing
6 smal onion sutes
4 pillo slipes
3 sherts
18 hankerchifs smal
6 hankerchifs large
8 colers
3 overhauls
10 bibbs
2 table clothes (coca stane)
1 table clothe (prun juce and eg)

After contemplating this list, Gissing went to his desk and began to
study his accounts. A resolve was forming in his mind.

CHAPTER FIVE

The summer evenings sounded a very different music from that thin
wheedling of April. It was now a soft steady vibration, the incessant
drone and throb of locust and cricket, and sometimes the sudden rasp,
dry and hard, of katydids. Gissing, in spite of his weariness, was all
fidgets. He would walk round and round the house in the dark, unable
to settle down to anything; tired, but incapable of rest. What is this
uneasiness in the mind, he asked himself? The great sonorous drumming of
the summer night was like the bruit of Time passing steadily by. Even
in the soft eddy of the leaves, lifted on a drowsy creeping air, was a
sound of discontent, of troublesome questioning. Through the trees he
could see the lighted oblongs of neighbours' windows, or hear stridulent
jazz records. Why were all others so cheerfully absorbed in the minutiae
of their lives, and he so painfully ill at ease? Sometimes, under the
warm clear darkness, the noises of field and earth swelled to a kind
of soft thunder: his quickened ears heard a thousand small outcries
contributing to the awful energy of the world--faint chimings and
whistlings in the grass, and endless flutter, rustle, and whirr. His own
body, on which hair and nails grew daily like vegetation, startled and
appalled him. Consciousness of self, that miserable ecstasy, was heavy
upon him.

He envied the children, who lay upstairs sprawled under their mosquito
nettings. Immersed in living, how happily unaware of being alive! He
saw, with tenderness, how naively they looked to him as the answer and
solution of their mimic problems. But where could he find someone to be
to him what he was to them? The truth apparently was that in his inward
mind he was desperately lonely. Reading the poets by fits and starts,
he suddenly realized that in their divine pages moved something of this
loneliness, this exquisite unhappiness. But these great hearts had had
the consolation of setting down their moods in beautiful words, words
that lived and spoke. His own st