The Argosy, Vol. XXIV No. 2 — page 182: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

374 LIVING IT DOWN, It was dark before peace reigned once more, and then Forrester told his story. ‘I was taken home to Grangerham, you know. My grandmother was ill at the time, and just starting south, so I was left in charge of my old nurse. She was an awful brick to me, was that old soul, and I don’t believe I know yet all she did and put up with for me. ‘‘ The doctors at Grangerham couldn’t make anything of me. One said I'd be cutting about again in a few weeks, and another said I’d be buried in afew days. It’s hard to decide when doctors disagree at that rate, and old Mary gave it up, and did what was the best thing—kept me quietly at home. Of course we thought that my grandmother had written to my father, but she hadn’t, so he can’t have heard for ages. We heard of my grandmother’s death presently, and then made the pleasant discovery that she had died in debt, and that the furniture of the house was hired, ‘That pulled Mary and me up short. She had saved a little, and I believe she spent every penny of that to get me up to London toa hospital. I didn’t have a bad time of it there for a month or two. I was considered an interesting case, and had all sorts of distinguished fellows to come and look at me, and I lived like a fight- ing cock all the time. I found, as long as I lay flat, and didn’t get knocked about, I was really comfortable, and, what was more, I could use my hands. That was no end of a blessing. I had picked up a few ideas about drawing, you know, at Bolsover, and found now I could do pretty well at it. I believe - some of my sketches at the Middlesex were thought well of. Mary came to see me nearly every day. I could see she was getting poorer and poorer, and when at last I was discharged, the rooms she took me to were about as poor as they could be to be respectable. ‘‘I’d hardly been back a week, when, one day after going out to try to sell some of my sketches, she came home ill, and died quite suddenly. I was all up a tree then—no money, no friends, no legs. I wrote to Framp- ton, but he can’t have got my letter. Then I got threatened with eviction, and all but left out in the street, when the person old Mary had sold my sketches to called around and ordered some more. I didn’t see him, but a brute of a woman who lived in the house did, and was cute enough to see she could make a good thing out of me. So she took possession of me, and ever since then I’ve been a prisoner, cut off from the outside world as completely as if I had been in a dungeon, grinding out pictures by the dozen, and never seeing a farthing of what they fetched, except in the food which Black Sal provided to keep me alive. Now and then, in an amiable mood, she would get mea newspaper; and once I had to illustrate a cheap edition of Cook’s voyages, and of course had the book to go by. But she never let me write to anybody, or see anybody, and mounted guard over me as’ jealously as if I had been a veritable goose that laid golden eggs. ~ You know the rest. We got turned out when they pulled down the old place, and took refuge in Driver’s Alley, a nice, select neighborhood; and there you found me, old man.’’ ‘Think of being near one another so long,’’ said Jeffreys, ‘‘and never knowing it.’’ a oO : Eomicboo