f bitterness by that retrospect of things hard and
squalid. Now, owning all the misery of it in comparison with what should
have been, I find that part of life interesting and pleasant to look back
upon--greatly more so than many subsequent times, when I lived amid
decencies and had enough to eat. Some day I will go to London, and spend
a day or two amid the dear old horrors. Some of the places, I know, have
disappeared. I see the winding way by which I went from Oxford Street,
at the foot of Tottenham Court Road, to Leicester Square, and, somewhere
in the labyrinth (I think of it as always foggy and gas-lit) was a shop
which had pies and puddings in the window, puddings and pies kept hot by
steam rising through perforated metal. How many a time have I stood
there, raging with hunger, unable to purchase even one pennyworth of
food! The shop and the street have long since vanished; does any man
remember them so feelingly as I? But I think most of my haunts are still
in existence: to tread again those pavements, to look at those grimy
doorways and purblind windows, would affect me strangely.

I see that alley hidden on the west side of Tottenham Court Road, where,
after living in a back bedroom on the top floor, I had to exchange for
the front cellar; there was a difference, if I remember rightly, of
sixpence a week, and sixpence, in those days, was a very great
consideration--why, it meant a couple of meals. (I once _found_ sixpence
in the street, and had an exultation which is vivid in me at this
moment.) The front cellar was stone-floored; its furniture was a table,
a chair, a wash-stand, and a bed; the window, which of course had never
been cleaned since it was put in, received light through a flat grating
in the alley above. Here I lived; here _I wrote_. Yes, "literary work"
was done at that filthy deal table, on which, by the bye, lay my Homer,
my Shakespeare, and the few other books I then possessed. At night, as I
lay in bed, I used to hear the tramp, tramp of a _pos