historic facts, but simply--'a good, rattling,
tarry-breeches, sea-salt column.' The pay was a couple of guineas;
and if I could so far oblige him as to let him have the article that
morning, he could make it money down.

I wrote the article in the reporters' room at the P.A. and sent it in
to the chief. In return I received a pill-box, on the top of which was
written, 'The prescription to be taken immediately.' I found within the
pillbox two sovereigns and two shillings wrapped in cotton-wool, and I
went my way to a square meal with the first money I had ever earned in
London. I found out afterwards that the date was nowhere near that of
Christopher Columbus's birthday; and, so far as I know, the article I
had written was never used. I was telling the story years afterwards,
and somebody informed me that the prescription on top of the pill-box
was Thackeray's. I was quite content to discover that, and I don't think
poor Lovel would have minded it either. He paid the debt of nature some
time ago, and when he left this world had the memory of more than one
good deed to sweeten his parting moments.

I went back to that gruesome hostelry and wrote an article on
'Impecunious Life in London.' It appeared in the _Gentleman's Magazine_,
then published by Messrs. Grant & Co. and under the editorship of my
old friend Richard Gowing. The article was not far from being
autobiographical. I think--but I am not quite sure--that I got sixteen
guineas for it. I know that it set me on my feet, and that since then
any acquaintance I may have had with the Thames Embankment has been
purely voluntary.

Poverty makes a man acquainted with strange bedfellows; and I made one
or two queer acquaintances on the Thames Embankment and acquired a taste
for vagabondising about among the poor which lasted a year or two and
has proved to be of no small service since. Slumming had not become
a fashion at that time of day; but I have never aimed at being in the
fashion, and I did a good deal of it. Through Archibald Forbes's kind
offices, I found an introduction to the _World_ journal, and, at Edmund
Yates's instigation, wrote a series of articles therein under the title
of 'Our Civilisation,' picking up all the quaint and picturesque odds
and ends of humanity I could find in London.

I met many people whom it was very difficult to describe and impossible
to caricature. Amongst them was a street artist who lived in Gee's
Court, off Oxford Street--a