and ill-health—­put a man on the rack.  The healthy man, and the man with a sufficient income, are apt to think that the poor man and the ill man make a great fuss about very little.  I don’t know about ill-health, but by George, I know all about poverty—­and I’ll tell you once for all.  For twenty years I was poor, and this is what that means.  To be tied hand and foot to a piece of hideous drudgery—­morning by morning, month by month, and with the consciousness too that, if health fails you, or if you lose your work, you will either starve or have to sponge on your friends—­never to be able to do what you like or go where you like—­to know that the world is full of beautiful places, delightful people, interesting ideas, books, talk, art, music—­to sicken for all these things, and not even to have the time or energy to get hold of such scraps of them as can be found cheap in London—­to feel time slipping away, and all your instincts for beautiful things unused and unsated—­to live a solitary, grubby, nasty life—­never able to entertain a friend, or to go a trip with a friend, or to do a kindness, or to help anyone generously—­and yet to feel that with an income which many people would regard as ridiculously inadequate, you could do most of these things—­the slavery, the bondage, the dreariness of it!” He broke off, much moved.

“But,” said I, “don’t many quite poor people live happily and contentedly and kindly with minute incomes?”

“Why, yes,” said Father Payne, “of course they do!—­and I’m willing enough to admit that I ought to have done better than I did.  But then I had been brought up differently, and by the time I had done with Oxford, I had all the tastes and instincts of the well-to-do man.  That was the mischief, that I had tasted freedom.  Of course, if I had been cast in a stronger and nobler mould, it would have been different—­but all my senses had been acutely developed, my faculties of interest and enjoyment and appreciation—­not gross things, mind you, nor feelings that ought to be starved, but just the wholesome delights of the well-educated man.  I did not want to be extravagant, and I knew too that there were millions of people in the same case as myself.  There was every reason why I should behave decently about it!  If I had been really interested in my work, I could have done better—­but I did not believe in the value of my work—­I taught men, not to educate them, but that they might pass an examination and never look at the beastly stuff again.  Whenever I reached the point at which I became interested, I had to hold my hand.  And then, too, the work tired me without exercising my mind.  There were the vacations, of course—­but I couldn’t afford to leave London—­I simply lived in hell.  I don’t say that I didn’t get some discipline out of it—­and my escape gave me a stock of gratitude and delight that has been simply inexhaustible.  The misery of it for me was that I had to live an unreal life.  If I