For a lifetime he had been exposed to all sorts
of whims and caprices, generally speaking of the most unreasonable
kind, and he had become so trained to take everything without
remonstrance or murmuring that every cross in his life came to him as
a chop alleged by an irritated customer to be raw or done to a
cinder. Poor wretch! he had one trouble, however, which he could not
accept with such equanimity, or rather with such indifference. His
wife was a drunkard. This was an awful trial to him. The worst
consequence was that his boy knew that his mother got drunk. The
neighbours kindly enough volunteered to look after the little man
when he was not at school, and they waylaid him and gave him dinner
when his mother was intoxicated; but frequently he was the first when
he returned to find out that there was nothing for him to eat, and
many a time he got up at night as late as twelve o'clock, crawled
downstairs, and went off to his father to tell him that "she was very
bad, and he could not go to sleep." The father, then, had to keep
his son in the Strand till it was time to close, take him back, and
manage in the best way he could. Over and over again was he obliged
to sit by this wretched woman's bedside till breakfast time, and then
had to go to work as usual.
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