"I wonder whether you ever think of the old days when we used to be
so happy in Keppel Street?" Ah me, how often in after life, in those
successful days when the battle has been fought and won, when all
seems outwardly to go well,--how often is this reference made to the
happy days in Keppel Street! It is not the prize that can make us
happy; it is not even the winning of the prize, though for the one
short half-hour of triumph that is pleasant enough. The struggle, the
long hot hour of the honest fight, the grinding work,--when the teeth
are set, and the skin moist with sweat and rough with dust, when all
is doubtful and sometimes desperate, when a man must trust to his own
manhood knowing that those around him trust to it not at all,--that
is the happy time of life. There is no human bliss equal to twelve
hours of work with only six hours in which to do it. And when
the expected pay for that work is worse than doubtful, the inner
satisfaction is so much the greater. Oh, those happy days in Keppel
Street, or it may be over in dirty lodgings in the Borough, or
somewhere near the Marylebone workhouse;--anywhere for a moderate
weekly stipend. Those were to us, and now are to others, and always
will be to many, the happy days of life. How bright was love, and how
full of poetry! Flashes of wit glanced here and there, and how they
came home and warmed the cockles of the heart. And the unfrequent
bottle! Methinks that wine has utterly lost its flavour since those
days. There is nothing like it; long work, grinding weary work, work
without pay, hopeless work; but work in which the worker trusts
himself, believing it to be good. Let him, like Mahomet, have one
other to believe in him, and surely nothing else is needed. "Ah me! I
wonder whether you ever think of the old days when we used to be so
happy in Keppel Street?"

Nothing makes a man so cross as success, or so soon turns a pleasant
friend into a captious acquaintance. Your successful man eats too
much and his stomach troubles him; he drinks too much and his nose
becomes blue. He wants pleasure and excitement, and roams about
looking for satisfaction in places where no man ever found it. He
frets himself with his banker's book, and everything tastes amiss to
him that has not on it the flavour of gold. The straw of an omnibus
always stinks; the linings of the cabs are filthy. There are but
three houses round London at which an eatable dinner may be obtained.
And yet a f