Paul Green, but who was currently believed to have been
christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long afterwards again,
to Mr. Sweedlepipe, in _Martin Chuzzlewit_), worked generally, side by
side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in-law, a
waterman. Poll Green's father had the additional distinction of being a
fireman, and was employed at Drury Lane theatre; where another relation
of Poll's, I think his little sister, did imps in the pantomimes.

"No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my
happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned
and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the
sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt
in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that,
day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and
raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never
to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so
penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that
even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams
that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander
desolately back to that time of my life.

"My mother and my brothers and sisters (excepting Fanny in the Royal
Academy of Music) were still encamped, with a young servant-girl from
Chatham workhouse, in the two parlors in the emptied house in Gower
Street north. It was a long way to go and return within the dinner-hour,
and usually I either carried my dinner with me, or went and bought it at
some neighboring shop. In the latter case, it was commonly a saveloy
and a penny loaf; sometimes, a fourpenny plate of beef from a cook's
shop; sometimes, a plate of bread and cheese, and a glass of beer, from
a miserable old public-house over the way: the Swan, if I remember
right, or the Swan and something else that I have forgotten. Once, I
remember tucking my own bread (which I had brought from home in the
morning) under my arm, wrapped up in a piece of paper like a book, and
going into the best dining-room in Johnson's alamode beef-house in Clare
Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamode
beef to eat with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little
apparition, coming in all alone, I don't kn