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 secondhand 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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