ke's Half-crown--Story of Boyhood
told--D. C. and C. D.--Enterprise of the
Cousins Lamert--First Employment in
Life--Blacking-Warehouse--A Poor Little
Drudge--Bob Fagin and Poll Green--"Facilis
Descensus"--Crushed Hopes--The Home in Gower
Street--Regaling Alamode--Home broken up--At
Mrs. Roylance's in Camden-town--Sundays in
Prison--Pudding-Shops and Coffee-Shops--What
was and might have been--Thomas and Harry--A
Lodging in Lant Street--Meals in the
Marshalsea--C. D. and the
Marchioness--Originals of Garland
Family--Adventure with Bob
Fagin--Saturday-Night Shows--Appraised
officially--Publican and Wife at Cannon
Row--Marshalsea Incident in
_Copperfield_--Incident as it
occurred--Materials for _Pickwick_--Sister
Fanny's Musical Prize--From Hungerford Stairs
to Chandos Street--Father's Quarrel with James
Lamert--Quits the Warehouse--Bitter
Associations of Servitude--What became of the
Blacking-Business.

THE incidents to be told now would probably never have been known to me,
or indeed any of the occurrences of his childhood and youth, but for the
accident of a question which I put to him one day in the March or April
of 1847.

I asked if he remembered ever having seen in his boyhood our friend the
elder Mr. Dilke, his father's acquaintance and contemporary, who had
been a clerk in the same office in Somerset House to which Mr. John
Dickens belonged. Yes, he said, he recollected seeing him at a house in
Gerrard Street, where his uncle Barrow lodged during an illness, and Mr.
Dilke had visited him. Never at any other time. Upon which I told him
that some one else had been intended in the mention made to me, for that
the reference implied not merely his being met accidentally, but his
having had some juvenile employment in a warehouse near the Strand; at
which place Mr. Dilke, being with the elder Dickens one day, had noticed
him, and received, in return for the gift of a half-crown, a very low
bow. He was silent for several minutes; I felt that I had
unintentionally touched a painful place in his memory; and to Mr. Dilke
I never spoke of the subject again. It was not, however, then, but some
weeks later, that Dickens made further allusion to my thus having struck
unconsciously upon a time of which he never could lose the remembrance