A man who is strong and survives can
hardly pace the pavements of a city for days searching for
employment, his pocket every day becoming lighter, without feeling in
after life that he is richer by something which all the universities
in the world could not have given him. The most dramatic of poets
cannot imagine, even afar off, what such a man feels and thinks,
especially if his temperament be nervous and foreboding. How
foreign, hard, repellent, are the streets in which he is a stranger,
alone amidst a crowd of people all intent upon their own occupation,
whilst he has none! At noon, when business is at its height, he,
with nothing to do, sits down on a seat in an open place, or, may be,
on the doorstep of an empty house, unties the little parcel he has
brought with him, and eats his dry bread. He casts up in his mind
the shops he has visited; he reflects that he has taken all the more
promising first, and that not more than two or three are left. He
thinks of the vast waste of the city all round him; its miles of
houses; and he has a more vivid sense of abandonment than if he were
on a plank in the middle of the Atlantic. Towards the end of the
afternoon the pressure in the offices and banks increases; the clerks
hurry hither and thither; he has no share whatever in the excitement;
he is an intrusion.
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