ling them what
I was working at without hinting what became of the work when it was
finished. One of my correspondents remonstrated with me for taking up
my quarters in a hotel in that part of London, and advised me to try
cheaper lodgings. Until I had something regular to rely upon, I was
told, it was absurd to launch into an extravagance of that sort. I have
often had to think how many hundreds of men, better equipped for the
intellectual arena than I was, as plucky, as determined, and as full of
hope, have gone down in the lonely and bitter sea of poverty in which
I floated in those days. My breakfast expenditure of threepence, with
a halfpenny to the waiter, secured me a look at the daily papers,
and every morning I went back to that beastly bedroom to write at my
dressing-table in denunciation of the Ministry, or to hold up to public
contumely some unpaid justice of the peace who had given a hungry
labourer six months for stealing twopenny-worth of turnips. I redressed
countless wrongs on paper in that draughty garret; but nothing came of
it There is no use in being too minute in narrating the history of that
time. It was bad enough to begin with, and grew at last to be about as
bad as it could be. That obliging uncle, who becomes your aunt when you
cross the Channel, was useful for a time. But at last there was nothing
more for him to take or for me to offer, and I was alone in London with
a vengeance.

Thousands of well-to-do people endure privation and discomfort every
year for the pure pleasure of it. In my campaigning days I lived on
black bread and onions and dirty water for seven weeks, and topped up
that agreeable record with four days' absolute starvation, But I had a
pocketful of money, though there was nothing to be bought with it, and
I had staunch comrades, and we were marching on with the certainty of
plenty before us. It was all endured easily enough, and now and then
there were outbursts of rollicking jocundity in spite of it The mere
physical suffering of privation is not a thousandth part of its pain.
The sense of loneliness, of defeat, of unmerited neglect; the blind
rebellion against the inequality with which the world's chances are
distributed; the impotent sense of power which finds no outlet--these
are the things which make poverty bitter. But there was nothing else for
it, and I took up _la vie en plein air_.

My favourite chamber in the Hotel of the Beautiful Star during the
hours of dark