"
"Starvation!" said the lawyer, smiling. "No man will
starve here on a shilling a day. I had on my hands
another young gentleman who remained continuously
intoxicated for six years on the same allowance." And
he once more busied himself with his papers.
In the time that followed, the image of the smiling
lawyer haunted Carthew's memory. "That three minutes'
talk was all the education I ever had worth talking
of," says he. "It was all life in a nutshell.
Confound it," I thought, "have I got to the point of
envying that ancient fossil?"
Every morning for the next two or three weeks the
stroke of ten found Norris, unkempt and haggard, at the
lawyer's door. The long day and longer night he spent
in the Domain, now on a bench, now on the grass under a
Norfolk Island pine, the companion of perhaps the
lowest class on earth, the Larrikins of Sydney.
Morning after morning, the dawn behind the lighthouse
recalled him from slumber; and he would stand and gaze
upon the changing east, the fading lenses, the
smokeless city, and the many-armed and many-masted
harbour growing slowly clear under his eyes.
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