But I believe I also mentioned that in the house in which she lived there were other poor people.

In the room opposite to hers, on the ground-floor, lived and worked a shoemaker--a man who had neither wife nor child, nor, so far as people knew, any near relative at all.

He was far from being in good health, and although he worked from morning to night, had a constant pain in his back, which was rather crooked, having indeed a little hump on it.

If his temper was not always of the best, I wonder what cleverest of watches or steam-engines would go as well as he did with such a twist in its back?
To see him seated on his low stool--in which, by the way, as if it had not been low enough, he sat in a leather-covered hole, perhaps for the sake of the softness and spring of the leather--with his head and body bent forward over his lapstone or his last, and his right hand with the quick broad-headed hammer hammering up and down on a piece of sole-leather; or with both his hands now meeting as if for a little friendly chat about something small, and then suddenly starting asunder as if in astonished anger, with a portentous hiss, you might have taken him for an automaton moved by springs, and imitating human actions in a very wonderful manner--so regular and machine-like were his motions, and so little did he seem to think about what he was at.

A little passing attention, a hint now and then from his head, was sufficient to keep his hands right, for they were so used to their work, and had been so well taught by his head, that they could pretty nearly have made a pair of shoes of themselves; so that the shoemaking trade is one that admits of a great deal of thought going on in the head that hangs over the work, like a sun over the earth ripening its harvest.