bout books anywhere. I thankfully closed with the
offer and began to study the ha'-penny evening papers with assiduity,
in order to learn the craft of manufacturing biographies of living
authors.

The greatest of all questions was thus settled: I should not starve.
But the question of a local habitation remained as difficult as ever.
I went upon wild-goose chases innumerable; was the victim of every kind
of chance hint; gathered fallacious information from garrulous
third-class passengers on many railways; confided my case to carters
and rural postmen, who played upon my innocence with genial malice;
stayed so long at village public-houses without visible motive that I
incurred the suspicion of the local constabulary, and on one memorable
occasion found myself identified with a long watched-for robber of
local hen-roosts. When I dropped upon some quaint village that, from a
pictorial point of view, seemed to offer all that I desired, I found my
tale, that I wished to settle in it, universally derided. No one could
conceive any sane person as being desirous of living in a village; the
design seemed wholly unaccountable to people who themselves would have
been only too glad to live in towns.

That I came from London was against me, It seemed to these village
Daniels barely possible that I was honest, and quite certain that I
cloaked some base designs under an innocent inquiry for empty cottages.
The little black bag in which I carried my lunch on these excursions
was the object of extraordinary hypotheses. At one time I was believed
to be selling tracts, at another time, tea; once I was suspected of
being an itinerant anarchist, doing a brisk business in infernal
machines. Landladies, who had lavished smiles upon me when they
supposed me an ordinary pedestrian in search of the picturesque, gave
me the cold shoulder when I began to explain my genuine intentions.
They sometimes treated me with such a mixture of aversion and alarm
that it was plain they doubted not only my sincerity but my sanity.
The travelling artist they knew, the pedlar, the insurance agent, and
the cockney beanfeaster; but the stranger who desired permanent
neighbourship with them they knew not; him they treated as a lunatic at
large. If the papers had chanced to be full at this time of the doings
of some flagrant murderer flying from justice, which fortunately for me
they were not, I have little doubt that these amiable villagers would
have del