benefit of the
insolvent debtors' act; and in one of these little Charles had his part
to play. One condition of the statute was that the wearing-apparel and
personal matters retained were not to exceed twenty pounds sterling in
value. "It was necessary, as a matter of form, that the clothes I wore
should be seen by the official appraiser. I had a half-holiday to
enable me to call upon him, at his own time, at a house somewhere beyond
the Obelisk. I recollect his coming out to look at me with his mouth
full, and a strong smell of beer upon him, and saying good-naturedly
that 'that would do,' and 'it was all right.' Certainly the hardest
creditor would not have been disposed (even if he had been legally
entitled) to avail himself of my poor white hat, little jacket, or
corduroy trowsers. But I had a fat old silver watch in my pocket, which
had been given me by my grandmother before the blacking-days, and I had
entertained my doubts as I went along whether that valuable possession
might not bring me over the twenty pounds. So I was greatly relieved,
and made him a bow of acknowledgment as I went out."

Still, the want felt most by him was the companionship of boys of his
own age. He had no such acquaintance. Sometimes he remembered to have
played on the coal-barges at dinner-time, with Poll Green and Bob Fagin;
but those were rare occasions. He generally strolled alone, about the
back streets of the Adelphi, or explored the Adelphi arches. One of his
favorite localities was a little public-house by the water-side, called
the Fox-under-the-hill, approached by an underground passage which we
once missed in looking for it together; and he had a vision which he has
mentioned in _Copperfield_ of sitting eating something on a bench
outside, one fine evening, and looking at some coal-heavers dancing
before the house. "I wonder what they thought of me," says David. He had
himself already said the same in his fragment of autobiography.

Another characteristic little incident he made afterwards one of
David's experiences, but I am able to give it here without the disguises
that adapt it to the fiction: "I was such a little fellow, with my poor
white hat, little jacket, and corduroy trowsers, that frequently, when I
went into the bar of a strange public-house for a glass of ale or porter
to wash down the saveloy and the loaf I had eaten in the street, they
didn't like to give it me. I remember, one evening (I had been somewhere
for