Page:The Chronicle of Clemendy.pdf/12

 success. I could never so much as have dreamed of it; if I could have followed it, it would not have comforted me at all. I had gone down into the glouring gloom of the furnace house, and there I must stay till the fires had done their work on me. Nothing from without could be of any help. When I first began to descend the steps that led to the dark and fiery place, one of my few friends, noticing the cloud upon me, said:

"What you want is a night at the theatre: meet me at the Lyceum on Thursday."

I went duly, and I am sure that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry were at their very best in "Much Ado About Nothing"; but the play did me no good. My relief must come from within, not from without.

This must have been in the autumn of 1882. All through 1883 and for six months of '84 I lived behind that window in the small room in Clarendon Road; utterly lonely, utterly poor, striving for some literary utterance and finding my only relief in the adventure of letters, though oppressed and tormented by all manner of discouragements. Not from without; again I say