roll up my
shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe's 'prentice, I should be distinguished
and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt that I was dusty with the
dust of the small coal, and that I had a weight upon my daily remembrance to
which the anvil was a feather. There have been occasions in my later life (I
suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had
fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull
endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when
my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered
road of apprenticeship to Joe.
    I remember that at a later period of my time, I used to stand about the
churchyard on Sunday evenings, when night was falling, comparing my own
perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness between them
by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both there came an unknown
way and a dark mist and then the sea. I was quite as dejected on the first
working-day of my apprenticeship as in that after-time; but I am glad to know
that I never breathed a murmur to Joe while my indentures lasted. It is about
the only thing I am glad to know of myself in that connection.
    For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I
proceed to add was Joe's. It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was
faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or a sailor. It was not
because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a
strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal
against the grain. It is not possible to know how far the influence of any
amiable honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world; but it is very
possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by, and I know right
well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain
contented Joe, and not of restless aspiring discontented me.
    What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew? What I dreaded
was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and commonest, should
lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one of the wooden windows of the
forge. I was haunted