ent exclaimed in
despair, 'Tom will one day be hanged.' When, however, he was informed
how the truant schoolboy had employed his truant hours, and the boy's
sketches were laid before him, forgetful of the consequences of forgeries
in a commercial society, he declared, with all the pride of a father,
'Tom will be a genius,' and he was right.

Worthy Mr. Pickwick seems to have known Ipswich about the same time as
myself. 'In the main street of Ipswich,' wrote the biographer of that
distinguished individual, 'on the left-hand side of the way, a short
distance after you have passed through the open space fronting the Town
Hall, stands an inn known far and wide by the appellation of the Great
White Horse, rendered the more conspicuous by a stone statue of some
rapacious animal, with flowing mane and tail, distantly resembling an
insane carthorse, which is elevated above the principal door. The Great
White Horse is famous in the neighbourhood in the same degree as a prize
ox, a county paper chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig, for its enormous
size. Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters
of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating
or sleeping in, beneath any one roof as are collected together between
the four walls of the Great White Horse of Ipswich.' This was the great
hotel of the Ipswich of my youth. As regards hotels, Ipswich has not
improved, but in every other way it has much advanced. One of the old
inns has been turned into a fine public hall, admirably adapted for
concerts and public meetings. The new Town Hall, Corn Exchange, and
Post-office are a credit to the town. The same may be said of the new
Museum and the Grammar School and the Working Men's College and that
health resort, the Arboretum; while by means of the new dock ships of
fifteen hundred tons burden can load and unload. Nowadays everybody says
Ipswich is a rising town, and what everyone says must be right. The
Ipswich people, at any rate, have firmly got that idea into their heads.
Its fathers and founders built the streets narrow, evidently little
anticipating for Ipswich the future it has since achieved. The Ipswich
of to-day is laid out on quite a different scale. It has a tram road
service evidently much in excess of the present population, and as you
wander in the suburbs you come to a sign-post bearing the name of a
street in which not even the enterprise of the speculative builder