At Home and Abroad

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. A YOUNG AUTHOR'S LIFE IN LONDON. I Reached London for the second time about the middle of March, 1846, after a dismal walk through Normandy, and a stormy passage across the Channel. I stood upon London Bridge, in the raw mist and the falling twilight, with a franc and A half in my pocket, and...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. A YOUNG AUTHOR'S LIFE IN LONDON. I Reached London for the second time about the middle of March, 1846, after a dismal walk through Normandy, and a stormy passage across the Channel. I stood upon London Bridge, in the raw mist and the falling twilight, with a franc and A half in my pocket, and deliberated what I should do. Weak from sea-sickness, hungry, chilled, and without a single acquaintance in the great city, my situation was about as hopeless as it is possible to conceive. Successful authors in their libraries, seated in cushioned chairs and dipping their pens into silver inkstands, may write about money with a beautiful scorn, and chant the praise of Poverty?the good goddess of Poverty, '' as George Sand, making 50,000 francs a year, enthusiastically terms her? but there is no condition in which the Real is so utterly at variance with the Ideal, as to be actually out of money, and hungry, with nothing to pawn and no friend to borrow from. Have you ever known it, my friend? If not, I could wish that you might have the experience for twenty-four Lours, only once in your life. I remembered, at last, that during my first visit to Lon- lon, eighteen months previous, I had lodged a few nights t a chop-house opposite the Aldgate Church-yard. The price of a bed was 'one shilling, which was within the compass of my franc and a half?and rest was even more to me than food. As I passed through the crowd towards Cheap- side and thence eastward to Aldgate, the lamps were lighted and the twilight settled into a drear, rainy night. In the lighted shops I saw joints of the dark crimson beef of Old England, hams, fish, heads of lettuce?everything fresh, succulent, and suggestive of bountiful boards. Men?the very porters and street-sweepers, even?were going home with their lit..