the child's first remembered penitence and confession. The
man remembered how he had sobbed himself to sleep. Why had he lied, and
_was_ a portion his in the lake of fire and brimstone, and what was
the good of being repentant and confessing, and being called a fool for
one's pains?

When the childish Paul came out of the kitchen-door into that
three-sided well of a brick-paved yard, and walked towards the
printing-office at the far end of the narrow strip of garden, the first
door beyond the pump-trough led him to a flight of stairs. The flight of
stairs, dirty and littered, mounted to a lumber-room, where there were
great piles of waste-paper, refuse from the shop and office. There were
many torn and battered old books here, and most of them were deserving
of the neglect into which they had fallen. The father had bought old
books literally by the cart-load at auction, and had weeded from the
masses of rubbish such things as promised to be saleable. The rest
were Paul's prey, and there were scraps of romance here and there, and
fugitive leaves of Hone's 'Everyday Book,' and the _Penny Magazine_,
with dingy woodcuts. One inestimable bundle of leaves unbound held the
greater part of 'Peregrine Pickle,' the whole of 'Robinson Crusoe,' and
part of 'The Devil on Two Sticks.' Brother Bob, dead and gone these many
years, had once kept pigeons in that lumber-room, and had driven a hole
in the wall, so that the birds might have free going out and in. This
was one of the family remembrances. Before there had been so many mouths
to fill and so many small figures to be clothed, there had been room
in the Armstrong household for some things which were not wholly
utilitarian. This keeping of pigeons was, as it were, a link with a
golden past, a bright thread in the tapestry of the bygone, which hung
on the eye of imagination in contrast with the sordid present, where few
of the threads were bright except to the inexhaustible fancy of a child,
who can see brightness almost anywhere.

The lumber-room had many memories for the dreamer in the tent-door. He
was often banished there for punishment, and he sometimes confessed to
faults which were not his, if they were not of too dark a dye, in the
hope of being sent thither. There he would grub amongst the mouldy
refuse of the place, and would find treatises of forgotten divines on
Daniel and the end of the world, and translations of Ovid on the Art
of Love sadly mutilated by rats, and na