ive and subversive, was, as an English faculty, turned
outward altogether and never turned inward?--by which convenient
circumstance subversion, or in other words alteration and variation were
not promoted. Such truths were wondrous things to make out in such
connections as my experience was then, and for no small time after, to
be confined to; but I positively catch myself listening to them, even
with my half-awakened ears, as if they had been all so many sermons of
the very stones of London. _There_, to come back to it, was exactly the
force with which these stones were to build me capaciously round: I
invited them, I besought them, to say all they would, and--to return to
my figure of a while back--it was soon so thoroughly as if they had
understood that, once having begun, they were to keep year after year
fairly chattering to me. Many of these pages, I fondly foresee, must
consist but of the record of their chatter. What was most of all
happening, I take it, was that under an absurd special stress I was
having, as who should say, to improvise a local medium and to arrange a
local consciousness. Against my due appropriation of those originally
closest at my hand inevitable accidents had conspired--and, to conclude
in respect to all this, if a considerable time was to be wanted, in the
event, for ideal certainty of adjustment, half the terms required by
this could then put forth the touching plea that they had quite achingly
waited.

IV

It may perhaps seem strange that the soil should have been watered by
such an incident as Mr. Lazarus Fox's reply, in the earliest rich dusk,
to my inquiry as to whither, while I occupied his rooms, I had best
betake myself most regularly for my dinner: "Well, there is the Bath
Hotel, sir, a very short walk away, where I should think you would be
very comfortable indeed. Mr. So-and-So dines at his club, sir--but there
is also the Albany in Piccadilly, to which I believe many gentlemen go."
I think I measured on the spot "all that it took" to make my friend most
advisedly--for it was clearly what he did--see me seated in lone state,
for my evening meal, at the heavy mahogany of the stodgy little hotel
that in those days and for long after occupied the north-west corner of
Arlington Street and to which, in common with many compatriots, I
repeatedly resorted during the years immediately following. We
_suffered_, however, on those occasions, the unmitigated coffee-room of
Mr. F