I carried them, one after another, to a bookstall in the City Road--one part of which, near our house, was almost all bookstalls and bird shops then--and sold them for whatever they would bring.

The keeper of this bookstall, who lived in a little house behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to be violently scolded by his wife every morning.

More than once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black eye, bearing witness to his excesses over-night (I am afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink), and he, with a shaking hand, endeavouring to find the needful shillings in one or other of the pockets of his clothes, which lay upon the floor, while his wife, with a baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never left off rating him.
Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he would ask me to call again; but his wife had always got some--had taken his, I dare say, while he was drunk--and secretly completed the bargain on the stairs, as we went down together.

At the pawnbroker's shop, too, I began to be very well known.

The principal gentleman who officiated behind the counter, took a good deal of notice of me; and often got me, I recollect, to decline a Latin noun or adjective, or to conjugate a Latin verb, in his ear, while he transacted my business.