Nature took revenge now and then.  In winter time I had fierce sore throats, sometimes accompanied by long and savage headaches.  Doctoring, of course, never occurred to me; I just locked my door, and, if I felt very bad indeed, went to bed—­to lie there, without food or drink, till I was able to look after myself again.  I could never ask from a landlady anything which was not in our bond, and only once or twice did I receive spontaneous offer of help.  Oh, it is wonderful to think of all that youth can endure!  What a poor feeble wretch I now seem to myself, when I remember thirty years ago!

XI.

Would I live it over again, that life of the garret and the cellar?  Not with the assurance of fifty years’ contentment such as I now enjoy to follow upon it!  With man’s infinitely pathetic power of resignation, one sees the thing on its better side, forgets all the worst of it, makes out a case for the resolute optimist.  Oh, but the waste of energy, of zeal, of youth!  In another mood, I could shed tears over that spectacle of rare vitality condemned to sordid strife.  The pity of it!  And—­if our conscience mean anything at all—­the bitter wrong!

Without seeking for Utopia, think what a man’s youth might be.  I suppose not one in every thousand uses half the possibilities of natural joy and delightful effort which lie in those years between seventeen and seven-and-twenty.  All but all men have to look back upon beginnings of life deformed and discoloured by necessity, accident, wantonness.  If a young man avoid the grosser pitfalls, if he keep his eye fixed steadily on what is called the main chance, if, without flagrant selfishness, he prudently subdue every interest to his own (by “interest” understanding only material good), he is putting his youth to profit, he is an exemplar and a subject of pride.  I doubt whether, in our civilization, any other ideal is easy of pursuit by the youngster face to face with life.  It is the only course altogether safe.  Yet compare it with what might be, if men respected manhood, if human reason were at the service of human happiness.  Some few there are who can look back upon a boyhood of natural delights, followed by a decade or so of fine energies honourably put to use, blended therewith, perhaps, a memory of joy so exquisite that it tunes all life unto the end; they are almost as rare as poets.  The vast majority think not of their youth at all, or, glancing backward, are unconscious of lost opportunity, unaware of degradation suffered.  Only by contrast with this thick-witted multitude can I pride myself upon my youth of endurance and of combat.  I had a goal before me, and not the goal of the average man.  Even when pinched with hunger, I did not abandon my purposes, which were of the mind.  But contrast that starved lad in his slum lodging with any fair conception of intelligent and zealous youth, and one feels that a dose of swift poison would have been the right remedy for such squalid ills.