Often his eyes refused to slumber or sleep, when, in obedience to the gentle request which love turned into a command, he lay down, beneath the shadow of his mother’s blessing; and his brain would throb, and his heart beat; and when _she_ slept, he would creep from his humble pallet and read by the light of the one lamp which illumined the court, and was (so he thought) fortunately placed opposite their window. Not that the boy understood all he read, but he imbibed its influence, and clasping his large brow within his palms, he would weigh and consider, and feel, within that narrow room, where poverty still lingered—though _then_, with their simple and few wants, rather as a shadow than a substance—and his heart throbbing as he thought, “What shall I do to be _great_?” even, it might have been, when the chastened and subdued spirit of his young but almost sightless mother murmured in her half-broken sleep, “What shall I do to be _saved_?” And then, as the spring advanced, and night and morning blended sweetly together, he hastened to his work joyfully—for he loved the labor that gave him food and knowledge. Matty would say his “food went into an ill skin—never did credit to man or _mortial_;” while his silent master, absorbed in his occupations, and pretty much abstracted from the every-day goings-on of his establishment—having, as he said of himself, an honest curse of a housekeeper and a jewel of a boy—was, nevertheless, sometimes startled by the singular questions Richard asked, meekly and modestly seeking for information, from him whom his enthusiastic nature believed one of the mild lights of literature.
What will youths who are pampered or wooed into learning say of the circulating boy of a circulating library, performing the menial offices of his station, yet working his mind ardently and steadily _onward_?
One evening, after he had gone out with his books, his mother entered the shop, timidly and with hesitating step, which those who struggle against blindness unconsciously assume. Matty was there, removing some papers; Peter, the most silent of all dogs, lay upon the mat, and Mrs. Dolland stumbled over him: Peter only gave vent to a stifled remonstrance, but that was enough to set Matty into a passion.