There were lots of old women's stories about the
place, and it certainly was very far from being a cheerful one;
but he was poor, and the rooms were cheap, and that would have
been quite a sufficient reason for him, if they had been ten times
worse than they really were. He was obliged to take some
mouldering fixtures that were on the place, and, among the rest,
was a great lumbering wooden press for papers, with large glass
doors, and a green curtain inside; a pretty useless thing for him,
for he had no papers to put in it; and as to his clothes, he carried
them about with him, and that wasn't very hard work, either.
Well, he had moved in all his furniture--it wasn't quite a truck-
full--and had sprinkled it about the room, so as to make the four
chairs look as much like a dozen as possible, and was sitting down
before the fire at night, drinking the first glass of two gallons of
whisky he had ordered on credit, wondering whether it would ever
be paid for, and if so, in how many years' time, when his eyes
encountered the glass doors of the wooden press. "Ah," says he,
"if I hadn't been obliged to take that ugly article at the old
broker's valuation, I might have got something comfortable for
the money.
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