and they shook hands through the
fence. And the next week Ajax, who was known in private life as Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, called at the house in Little Queen Street where the
Lambs lived, and they all had gin and water, and the elder Lamb played the
harpsichord, a secondhand one that had been presented by Mr. Salt, and
recited poetry, and Coleridge talked the elder Lamb under the table and
argued the entire party into silence. Coleridge was only seventeen then,
but a man grown, and already took snuff like a courtier, tapping the lid
of the box meditatively and flashing a conundrum the while on the admiring
company.

Mary kept about as close run of the Blue-Coat School as if she had been a
Blue-Coat herself. Still, she felt it her duty to keep one lesson in
advance of her brother, just to know that he was progressing well.

He continued to go to school until he was fourteen, when he was set to
work in the South Sea Company's office, because his income was needed to
keep the family. Mary was educating the boy with the help of Mr. Salt's
library, for a boy as fine as Charles must be educated, you know. By and
by the bubble burst, and young Lamb was transferred to the East India
Company's office, and being promoted was making nearly a hundred pounds a
year.

And Mary sewed and borrowed books and toiled incessantly, but was ill at
times. People said her head was not just right--she was overworked and
nervous or something! The father had lost his place on account of too much
gin and water, especially gin; the mother was almost helpless from
paralysis, and in the family was an aged maiden aunt to be cared for. The
only regular income was the salary of Charles.

There they lived in their poverty and lowliness, hoping for better things!

Charles was working away over the ledgers, and used to come home fagged
and weary, and Coleridge was far away, and there was no boy to educate
now, and only sick and foolish and quibbling people on whom to strike
fire. The demnition grind did its work for Mary Lamb as surely as it is
today doing it for countless farmers' wives in Iowa and Illinois.

Thus ran the years away.

Mary Lamb, aged thirty-two, gentle, intelligent and wondrous kind, in
sudden frenzy seized a knife from the table and with one thrust sank the
blade into her mother's heart. Charles Lamb, in an adjoining room, hearing
the commotion, entered quickly and taking the knife from his sister's
hand, put his arm about her an