As the things that were, are now no more, and even three short years have made sad havoc amidst the brick antiquities of dear Pall Mall, it may not be amiss more particularly to commemorate the appearance--at the time our tale commences--of that agglomeration of street corners, Charing Cross, from which--on account I suppose of its beautiful vagueness--all rogues and insolvent debtors were wont to date their letters. But this commemoration had best be given in describing the effect of the whole upon a young and unsophisticated mind. From a place that they call a hotel, in Piccadilly--Think of a man taking up his abode at a hotel in Piccadilly!--but he knew no better--From a hotel, in Piccadilly, at about half-past five o'clock on the morning of the last day of August, one thousand eight hundred and something, set out a hackney coach, containing within its sphere of rotten wood and rusty leather a small portmanteau on the front seat, and the portmanteau's master on the other. He was a well-made youth, of about five-and-twenty years of age, with firm, graceful, and yet powerful limbs, and a fresh clear complexion--not villainous red and white, but one general tone of florid health. His eye was blue and bright, and the clustering curls of fair hair--as pure Saxon as Sharon Turner's last new book--might have looked somewhat girlish, had it not been for the manly features and the free dauntless look that they overshadowed. At the same time, be it remarked, that there was something of melancholy, if not of gloom, in his aspect; but that did not prevent him--after the chambermaid had been satisfied, and the waiter had been paid, and boots had had his fees, and the porter had claimed more than his due; and, in short, all the exactions of an inn had been played off upon him in succession--that did not prevent him, when fairly rolling away towards the top of the Haymarket, from gazing out upon the scene around him with a sufficient degree of open-eyed curiosity to make the waterman stick his tongue into his cheek, and mentally denominate him "_a raw_." It may be necessary to inform the unlearned reader, that the sun rises, in the end of August, a few minutes after five in the morning, and at the time I speak of the great luminary was pouring a flood of radiance through the loaded air of the vast city, filling the long empty perspective of the streets with the golden mistiness of the morning light. Closed within the dull boards which defend the precious wares of many a careful tradesman from the cosmopolite fingers of the liberal Many, the shops exhibited nothing but the names and occupations of their various owners; but the wide streets, with all their irregular buildings, in the broad light and shade, were not without beauty of their own peculiar kind, distinct from all the mighty associations connected with their existence.