On the whole I concluded that a three and a half years'
apprenticeship to a rough life was enough; the shop had done much for
him; it had kept him going after a fashion, when he was in great need; it
had thrown him upon his own resources, and taught him to see profitable
openings all around him, where a few months before he would have seen
nothing but insuperable difficulties; it had enlarged his sympathies by
making him understand the lower classes, and not confining his view of
life to that taken by gentlemen only. When he went about the streets and
saw the books outside the second-hand book-stalls, the bric-a-brac in the
curiosity shops, and the infinite commercial activity which is
omnipresent around us, he understood it and sympathised with it as he
could never have done if he had not kept a shop himself.
He has often told me that when he used to travel on a railway that
overlooked populous suburbs, and looked down upon street after street of
dingy houses, he used to wonder what kind of people lived in them, what
they did and felt, and how far it was like what he did and felt himself.
Now, he said he knew all about it. I am not very familiar with the
writer of the Odyssey (who, by the way, I suspect strongly of having been
a clergyman), but he assuredly hit the right nail on the head when he
epitomised his typical wise man as knowing "the ways and farings of many
men.
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