 an
important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirits to certain packet
ships. I forget now where they chiefly went, but I think there were some among
them that made voyages both to the East and West Indies. I know that a great
many empty bottles were one of the consequences of this traffic, and that
certain men and boys were employed to examine them against the light, and reject
those that were flawed, and to rinse and wash them. When the empty bottles ran
short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or corks to be fitted to
them, or seals to be put upon the corks, or finished bottles to be packed in
casks. All this work was my work, and of the boys employed upon it I was one.
    There were three or four of us, counting me. My working place was
established in a corner of the warehouse, where Mr. Quinion could see me, when
he chose to stand up on the bottom rail of his stool in the counting-house, and
look at me through a window above the desk. Hither, on the first morning of my
so auspiciously beginning life on my own account, the oldest of the regular boys
was summoned to show me my business. His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a
ragged apron and a paper cap. He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and
walked, in a black velvet head-dress, in the Lord Mayor's Show. He also informed
me that our principal associate would be another boy whom he introduced by the -
to me - extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes. I discovered, however, that this
youth had not been christened by that name, but that it had been bestowed upon
him in the warehouse, on account of his complexion, which was pale or mealy.
Mealy's father was a waterman, who had the additional distinction of being a
fireman, and was engaged as such at one of the large theatres; where some young
relation of Mealy's - I think his little sister - did Imps in the Pantomimes.
    No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship; compared these henceforth every-day associates with those of my
happier childhood - not to say with Steerforth, Traddles, and the rest of those
boys; and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man
crushed in my bosom. The deep remembrance of the sense I had, of being utterly
without hope now; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery
