inary necessaries of life.

"I say I shall pay your lodging for the present, but before long I
expect you to support yourself entirely. I cannot afford it,
Frederick."

It had never occurred to me before that I cost anything to keep, but the
fact was slowly beginning to dawn on me, and the prospect of having
shortly to support myself cast rather a damper over the pictures I had
drawn to myself of my pleasant life in London.

"Good-bye," said my uncle. "Here is half-a-sovereign for you, which
remember is on no account to be spent. Keep it by you, and don't part
with it. Good-night."

And so my uncle and I parted.

It was with rather subdued feelings that next morning I set out betimes
for the station, lugging my small trunk along with me. That trunk and
the half-sovereign I was not to spend comprised, along with the money
which was to pay my fare, and the clothes I wore, the sum of my worldly
goods. The future lay all unknown before me. My work at Hawk Street,
my residence at Mrs Nash's, my eight shillings a week, I had yet to
find out what they all meant; at present all was blank--all, that is,
except one spot, and that was the spot occupied by my friend Smith. I
could reckon on him, I knew, whatever else failed me.

I caught my train without much difficulty, as I was at the station at
least half an hour before it was due, and had a third-class carriage to
myself all the way to London. There were not many people travelling at
that early hour, and when I reached the great metropolis at seven
o'clock the station and streets looked almost as deserted as on the
former occasion they had been crowded.

Mrs Nash's residence, so the card said, was in Beadle Square, wherever
that might be. I was, however, spared the anxiety of hunting the place
up, for my uncle had authorised me to spend a shilling in a cab for the
occasion; and thus conveyed, after twistings and turnings which
positively made my head ache, I arrived in state at my future lodging.

The "square" was, like many other City squares, a collection of
tumbledown dingy houses built round an open space which might once have
contained nothing but green grass and trees, but was now utterly
destitute of either. There was indeed an enclosure within rusty and
broken iron palings, but it contained nothing but mud, a few old beer-
cans, and a lot of waste-paper, and one dead cat and one or two half-
starved living ones. A miserable look-out, truly, as I sto