o help me God.

"Sundays, Fanny and I passed in the prison. I was at the academy in
Tenterden Street, Hanover Square, at nine o'clock in the morning, to
fetch her; and we walked back there together, at night.

"I was so young and childish, and so little qualified--how could I be
otherwise?--to undertake the whole charge of my own existence, that, in
going to Hungerford Stairs of a morning, I could not resist the stale
pastry put out at half-price on trays at the confectioners' doors in
Tottenham Court Road; and I often spent in that the money I should have
kept for my dinner. Then I went without my dinner, or bought a roll, or
a slice of pudding. There were two pudding-shops between which I was
divided, according to my finances. One was in a court close to St.
Martin's Church (at the back of the church) which is now removed
altogether. The pudding at that shop was made with currants, and was
rather a special pudding, but was dear: two penn'orth not being larger
than a penn'orth of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter
was in the Strand, somewhere near where the Lowther Arcade is now. It
was a stout, hale pudding, heavy and flabby; with great raisins in it,
stuck in whole, at great distances apart. It came up hot, at about noon
every day; and many and many a day did I dine off it.

"We had half an hour, I think, for tea. When I had money enough, I used
to go to a coffee-shop, and have half a pint of coffee, and a slice of
bread-and-butter. When I had no money, I took a turn in Covent Garden
market, and stared at the pineapples. The coffee-shops to which I most
resorted were, one in Maiden Lane; one in a court (non-existent now)
close to Hungerford market; and one in St. Martin's Lane, of which I
only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door
there was an oval glass plate, with COFFEE-ROOM painted on it, addressed
towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of
coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and
read it backward on the wrong side MOOR-EEFFOC (as I often used to do
then, in a dismal reverie,) a shock goes through my blood.

"I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the
scantiness of my resources and the difficulties of my life. I know that
if a shilling or so were given me by any one, I spent it in a dinner or
a tea. I know that I worked, from morning to night, with common men and
boys, a shabby child. I know t