Had John Thomas Smith been granted the scriptural span of life, he might have read the _Pickwick Papers_. But the implacable call came in March 1833, and he left various enterprises unfinished. He had collected the materials for a gossipping history of Covent Garden; these have never been edited. The well-known _Antiquarian Rambles in the Streets of London_, published in 1846, originated in Smith’s notes, but four-fifths of the book was certainly written by its editor, Dr. Charles Mackay. The book from which Smith has his sobriquet was published in 1845. _A Book for a Rainy Day_ places its author in that line of London’s watchful lovers which began with John Stow and has not ended with Sir Walter Besant. Now, when London’s streets are changing as they have not changed since the Great Fire, he lies in that bare field of the dead behind the Bayswater Road, where, on the grave of a greater writer, you read the words, “Alas! poor Yorick.” W. W. A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY The Reader is requested to keep in mind that those events which I relate of myself when “mewling in my nurse’s arms,” and until my fourth year, were communicated to me by my parents, and that my statements from that period are mostly from my own memory;--Miranda proved to Prospero that she recollected an event in her fourth year. 1766. My father informed me, that in the evening of the 23rd of June 1766, which must have been much about the time when Marylebone Gardens echoed the melodious notes of Tommy Lowe,[2] and whilst there was _The Devil to Pay_ at Richmond with Mr. and Mrs. Love,[3] my mother, on returning from a visit to her brother, Mr. Edward Tarr,[4] became so seriously indisposed, that she most strenuously requested him to allow her to return home in a hackney coach, whilst he went to Jermyn Street for Dr. Hunter.[5] Upon that gentleman’s arrival at my father’s door, No. 7, in Great Portland Street,[6] Marylebone, he assisted the nurse in conveying my mother and myself to her chamber. Although I dare not presume to suppose that the vehicle in which I was born had been the equipage of the great John Duke of Marlborough, or Sarah his Duchess, at all events I probably may be correct in the conjecture that the hack was in some degree similar to those introduced by Kip, in his Plates for Strype’s edition of Stowe.[7] Hackney chairs were then so numerous, that their stands extended round Covent Garden, and often down the adjacent streets;[8] these vehicles frequently enabled physicians to approach their patients in a warm state. The forms of those to which I allude are also given in Kip’s prints above mentioned; and who knows but that they, in their turn, have conveyed Voltaire from the theatre to his lodging in Maiden Lane?[9]