iography without an iota of fiction in the
whole of it, will be the greatest novelty yet offered to its
fastidiousness. As many of the events which will be my province to
record, are singular and even startling, I may be permitted to sport a
little moral philosophy, drawn from the kennel in Lower Thames Street,
which may teach my readers to hesitate ere they condemn as invention
mere matters of absolute, though uncommon fact.

Let us stand with that old gentleman under the porch of Saint Magnus's
Church, for the rain is thrashing the streets till they actually look
white, and the kennel before us is swelled into a formidable, and hardly
fordable brook. That kennel is the stream of life--and a dirty and a
weary one it is, if we may judge by the old gentleman's looks. All is
hurried into that common sewer, the grave! What bubbles float down it!
Everything that is fairly in the middle of the stream seems to sail with
it, steadily and triumphantly--and many a filthy fragment enters the
sewer with a pomp and dignity not unlike the funeral obsequies of a
great lord. But my business is with that little chip; by some means it
has been thrust out of the principal current, and, now that it is out,
see what pranks it is playing. How erratic are its motions!--into what
strange holes and corners it is thrust! The same phenomenon will happen
in life. Once start a being out of the usual course of existence, and
many and strange will be his adventures ere he once more be allowed to
regain the common stream, and be permitted to float down, in silent
tranquillity, to the grave common to all.

About seven o'clock in the evening of the 20th of February, 17---, a
post-chaise with four horses drove with fiery haste up to the door of
the Crown Inn, at Reading. The evening had closed in bitterly. A
continuous storm of mingled sleet and rain had driven every being who
had a home, to the shelter it afforded. As the vehicle stopped, with a
most consequential jerk, and the steps were flung down with that clatter
post-boys will make when they can get four horses before their leathern
boxes, the solitary inmate seemed to shrink further into its dark
corner, instead of coming forward eagerly to exchange the comforts of
the blazing hearth for the damp confinement of a hired chaise. Thrice
had the obsequious landlord bowed his well-powdered head, and, at each
inclination, wiped off; with the palm of his hand, the rain-drops that
had settle