Munro, that I should
not dream of removing him from your hands." On the
contrary, he snatched it away from me with avidity, and
I retired with some credit, an excellent advertisement,
and a guinea.
These are one or two of the points of interest
which show above the dead monotony of my life--small
enough, as you see, but even a sandhill looms large in
Holland. In the main, it is a dreary sordid record of
shillings gained and shillings spent--of scraping for
this and scraping for that, with ever some fresh slip of
blue paper fluttering down upon me, left so jauntily by
the tax-collector, and meaning such a dead-weight pull to
me. The irony of my paying a poor-rate used to amuse me.
I should have been collecting it. Thrice at a crisis I
pawned my watch, and thrice I rallied and rescued it.
But how am I to interest you in the details of such a
career? Now, if a fair countess had been so good as to
slip on a piece of orange peel before my door, or if the
chief merchant in the town had been saved by some
tour-de-force upon my part, or if I had been summoned
out at midnight to attend some nameless person in a
lonely house with a princely fee for silence--then I
should have something worthy of your attention. But the
long months and months during which I listened to the
throb of the charwoman's heart and the rustle of the
greengrocer's lungs, present little which is not dull and
dreary.
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