and
passionate. I am sure they were at that time: all moons were. Then, the
lightness of my stomach would rise to the head, so that I walked on air,
and brilliance played from me like sparks from a cat's back. I could
have written wonderful stuff then--had I the mind. I wandered and
wandered; and that is about all I remember. Bits of it come back to me
at times, though....

I remember, finally, sloughing through Bishopsgate into Norton Folgate,
when I was down to fifteen-and-sixpence. In Norton Folgate I found a
timid cocoa-room, and, careless of the future, I entered and gorged.
Sausages ... mashed ... bread ... tomatoes ... pints of hot tea.... Too,
I found sage wisdom in the counter-boy. He had been through it. We put
the matter into committee, and it was discussed from every possible
point of view. I learnt that I could get a room for next to nothing
round about there, and that there was nothing like studying the "Sits.
Vacant" in the papers at the Library; or, if there was anything like it,
it was trusting to your luck. No sense in getting the bleeding pip. As
he was eighteen and I was seventeen, I took his counsel to heart, and,
fired with a repletion of sausage and potato, I stalked lodgings through
the forests of Kingsland Road and Cambridge Road. In the greasy, strewn
highway, where once the Autonomie Club had its home, I struck Cudgett
Street--a narrow, pale cul-de-sac, containing fifty dilapidated
cottages; and in the window of the first a soiled card: "One Room to
Let."

The doorstep, flush with the pavement, was crumbling. The door had
narrowly escaped annihilation by fire; but the curtains in the
front-room window were nearly white. Two bare-armed ladies, with skirts
hiked up most indelicately behind them, were sloshing down their
respective doorsteps, and each wall was ragged with five or six frayed
heads thrust from upper windows for the silken dalliance of
conversation. However, it was sanctuary. It looked cheap. I knocked.

A lady in frayed alpaca, carrying a house-flannel, came to hearken. "Oh,
yerss. Come in. Half a jiff till I finished this bottom stair. Now
then--whoa!--don't touch that banister; it's a bit loose. Ver narsely
furnished you'll find it is. There. Half-a-crown a week. Dirt cheap,
too. Why, Mrs. Over-the-Road charges four for hers. But I can't. I ain't
got the cheek."

I tripped over the cocoanut mat. The dulled windows were draped with a
strip of gauze. The "narse furnicher" wasn