followed the preparatory day-school, a school for girls and boys to
which he went with his sister Fanny, and which was in a place called
Rome (pronounced Room) Lane. Revisiting Chatham in his manhood, and
looking for the place, he found it had been pulled down to make a new
street, "ages" before; but out of the distance of the ages arose
nevertheless a not dim impression that it had been over a dyer's shop;
that he went up steps to it; that he had frequently grazed his knees in
doing so; and that in trying to scrape the mud off a very unsteady
little shoe, he generally got his leg over the scraper.[2] Other similar
memories of childhood have dropped from him occasionally in his lesser
writings; whose readers may remember how vividly portions of his boyhood
are reproduced in his fancy of the Christmas-tree, and will hardly have
forgotten what he says, in his thoughtful little paper on Nurses'
stories, of the doubtful places and people to which children may be
introduced before they are six years old, and forced, night after night,
to go back to against their wills, by servants to whom they are
intrusted. That childhood exaggerates what it sees, too, has he not
tenderly told? How he thought the Rochester High Street must be at least
as wide as Regent Street, which he afterwards discovered to be little
better than a lane; how the public clock in it, supposed to be the
finest clock in the world, turned out to be as moon-faced and weak a
clock as a man's eyes ever saw; and how in its town-hall, which had
appeared to him once so glorious a structure that he had set it up in
his mind as the model on which the genie of the lamp built the palace
for Aladdin, he had painfully to recognize a mere mean little heap of
bricks, like a chapel gone demented. Yet not so painfully, either, when
second thoughts wisely came. "Ah! who was I that I should quarrel with
the town for being changed to me, when I myself had come back, so
changed, to it? All my early readings and early imaginations dated from
this place, and I took them away so full of innocent construction and
guileless belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the
wiser and so much the worse!"

And here I may at once expressly mention, what already has been hinted,
that even as Fielding described himself and his belongings in Captain
Booth and Amelia, and protested always that he had writ in his books
nothing more than he had seen in life, so it may be said of Dick