fore him. Nay, he had three corporals and a sergeant for
company.

But his lot was relieved by two strange things, presently to appear. In
1793 war again broke out, the great French war. This lighted London of
some of its superfluous hordes, and lost Israel the subterranean society
of his friends, the corporals and sergeant, with whom wandering forlorn
through the black kingdoms of mud, he used to spin yarns about sea
prisoners in hulks, and listen to stories of the Black Hole of Calcutta;
and often would meet other pairs of poor soldiers, perfect strangers, at
the more public corners and intersections of sewers--the Charing-Crosses
below; one soldier having the other by his remainder button, earnestly
discussing the sad prospects of a rise in bread, or the tide; while
through the grating of the gutters overhead, the rusty skylights of the
realm, came the hoarse rumblings of bakers' carts, with splashes of the
flood whereby these unsuspected gnomes of the city lived.

Encouraged by the exodus of the lost tribes of soldiers, Israel returned
to chair-bottoming. And it was in frequenting Covent-Garden market, at
early morning, for the purchase of his flags, that he experienced one
of the strange alleviations hinted of above. That chatting with the
ruddy, aproned, hucksterwomen, on whose moist cheeks yet trickled the
dew of the dawn on the meadows; that being surrounded by bales of hay,
as the raker by cocks and ricks in the field; those glimpses of garden
produce, the blood-beets, with the damp earth still tufting the roots;
that mere handling of his flags, and bethinking him of whence they must
have come, the green hedges through which the wagon that brought them
had passed; that trudging home with them as a gleaner with his sheaf of
wheat;--all this was inexpressibly grateful. In want and bitterness,
pent in, perforce, between dingy walls, he had rural returns of his
boyhood's sweeter days among them; and the hardest stones of his
solitary heart (made hard by bare endurance alone) would feel the stir
of tender but quenchless memories, like the grass of deserted flagging,
upsprouting through its closest seams. Sometimes, when incited by some
little incident, however trivial in itself, thoughts of home
would--either by gradually working and working upon him, or else by an
impetuous rush of recollection--overpower him for a time to a sort of
hallucination.

Thus was it:--One fair half-day in the July of 1800, by good luck