of ring-droppers, pea and
thimble-riggers, duffers, touters, or any of those bloodless sharpers,
who are, perhaps, a little better known to the Police. He fell into
conversation with no gentleman who took him into a public-house, where
there happened to be another gentleman who swore he had more money than
any gentleman, and very soon proved he had more money than one gentleman
by taking his away from him; neither did he fall into any other of
the numerous man-traps which are set up without notice, in the public
grounds of this city. But he lost his way. He very soon did that; and in
trying to find it again he lost it more and more.

Now, Tom, in his guileless distrust of London, thought himself very
knowing in coming to the determination that he would not ask to be
directed to Furnival's Inn, if he could help it; unless, indeed, he
should happen to find himself near the Mint, or the Bank of England; in
which case he would step in, and ask a civil question or two, confiding
in the perfect respectability of the concern. So on he went, looking up
all the streets he came near, and going up half of them; and thus,
by dint of not being true to Goswell Street, and filing off into
Aldermanbury, and bewildering himself in Barbican, and being constant to
the wrong point of the compass in London Wall, and then getting himself
crosswise into Thames Street, by an instinct that would have been
marvellous if he had had the least desire or reason to go there, he
found himself, at last, hard by the Monument.

The Man in the Monument was quite as mysterious a being to Tom as the
Man in the Moon. It immediately occurred to him that the lonely creature
who held himself aloof from all mankind in that pillar like some old
hermit was the very man of whom to ask his way. Cold, he might be;
little sympathy he had, perhaps, with human passion--the column seemed
too tall for that; but if Truth didn't live in the base of the Monument,
notwithstanding Pope's couplet about the outside of it, where in London
(thought Tom) was she likely to be found!

Coming close below the pillar, it was a great encouragement to Tom to
find that the Man in the Monument had simple tastes; that stony
and artificial as his residence was, he still preserved some rustic
recollections; that he liked plants, hung up bird-cages, was not wholly
cut off from fresh groundsel, and kept young trees in tubs. The Man in
the Monument, himself, was sitting outside the door--his o