me to decline it. I had always
been on excellent terms with Mr. Petulengro, but I reflected that people
might be excellent friends when they met occasionally in the street, or
on the heath, or in the wood; but that these very people when living
together in a house, to say nothing of a tent, might quarrel. I
reflected, moreover, that Mr. Petulengro had a wife. I had always, it is
true, been a great favourite with Mrs. Petulengro, who had frequently
been loud in her commendation of the young rye, as she called me, and his
turn of conversation; but this was at a time when I stood in need of
nothing, lived under my parents' roof, and only visited at the tents to
divert and to be diverted. The times were altered, and I was by no means
certain that Mrs. Petulengro, when she should discover that I was in need
both of shelter and subsistence, might not alter her opinion both with
respect to the individual and what he said--stigmatising my conversation
as saucy discourse, and myself as a scurvy companion; and that she might
bring over her husband to her own way of thinking, provided, indeed, he
should need any conducting. I therefore, though without declaring my
reasons, declined the offer of Mr. Petulengro, and presently, after
shaking him by the hand, bent again my course towards the Great City.

I crossed the river at a bridge considerably above that hight of London;
for not being acquainted with the way, I missed the turning which should
have brought me to the latter. Suddenly I found myself in a street of
which I had some recollection, and mechanically stopped before the window
of a shop at which various publications were exposed; it was that of the
bookseller to whom I had last applied in the hope of selling my ballads
or Ab Gwilym, and who had given me hopes that in the event of my writing
a decent novel, or a tale, he would prove a purchaser. As I stood
listlessly looking at the window, and the publications which it
contained, I observed a paper affixed to the glass by wafers with
something written upon it. I drew yet nearer for the purpose of
inspecting it; the writing was in a fair round hand--"A Novel or Tale is
much wanted," was what was written.

CHAPTER LV.

"I must do something," said I, as I sat that night in my lonely
apartment, with some bread and a pitcher of water before me.

Thereupon taking some of the bread, and eating it, I considered what I
was to do. "I have no idea what I am to do,"