nd
Mrs. Inchbald's _Collection of Farces_. These latter had been, as well,
in the little library to which access was open to him; and of all of
them his earliest remembrance was the having read them over and over at
Chatham, not for the first, the second, or the third time. They were a
host of friends when he had no single friend; and in leaving the place,
I have often heard him say, he seemed to be leaving them too, and
everything that had given his ailing little life its picturesqueness or
sunshine. It was the birthplace of his fancy; and he hardly knew what
store he had set by its busy varieties of change and scene, until he saw
the falling cloud that was to hide its pictures from him forever. The
gay bright regiments always going and coming, the continual paradings
and firings, the successions of sham sieges and sham defenses, the plays
got up by his cousin in the hospital, the navy-pay yacht in which he had
sailed to Sheerness with his father, and the ships floating out in the
Medway with their far visions of sea,--he was to lose them all. He was
never to watch the boys at their games any more, or see them sham over
again the sham sieges and sham defenses. He was to be taken to London
inside the stage-coach Commodore; and Kentish woods and fields, Cobham
park and hall, Rochester cathedral and castle, and all the wonderful
romance together, including the red-cheeked baby he had been wildly in
love with, were to vanish like a dream. "On the night before we came
away," he told me, "my good master came flitting in among the
packing-cases to give me Goldsmith's _Bee_ as a keepsake. Which I kept
for his sake, and its own, a long time afterwards." A longer time
afterwards he recollected the stage-coach journey, and said in one of
his published papers that never had he forgotten, through all the
intervening years, the smell of the damp straw in which he was packed
and forwarded like game, carriage-paid. "There was no other inside
passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and
it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I expected
to find it."

The earliest impressions received and retained by him in London were of
his father's money involvements; and now first he heard mentioned "the
deed," representing that crisis of his father's affairs in fact which is
ascribed in fiction to Mr. Micawber's. He knew it in later days to have
been a composition with creditors; though at this earlie