I only remember one other thing about those runs. I used to put on very little clothes, of course, but even so, naturally worked myself up into a terrific perspiration, which was what I meant to do, it being a most healthful thing for people who have to sit still all day. But my aunt was quite alarmed when I returned to have a bath and a rub down; and then it came out that she had never seen anybody in a real perspiration before! I roared with laughter and explained, and she said that she thought people only had perspirations when they were ill. She had never been in one in her whole life apparently. She was a very nice and kind woman, but I puzzled her fearfully, because she had never known many boys of my age, and though she smoked cigarettes herself, she thought they were bad for me and begged me to be very temperate in the use of them. To be temperate in everything was a mania with her. I must have upset her flat a lot one way and another; but she was very patient and wouldn’t hear of my going into lodgings alone. “You are much too young,” she said. “You must look upon me as your mother till you are eighteen, at any rate.” Then it was—after I had been in the City of London six weeks—that I met with my first great misfortune, though it began as a most hopeful and promising affair. I had heard, of course, from Dicky Travers and Mr. Blades and others, that there were plenty of shady characters in London, and that their shadiness took all sorts of forms; but this did not bother me much, because a clerk such as I was would not, I thought, provoke a shady character, owing to my youth. But a good many of these shady characters mark down young men as their regular and lawful prey, like the tiger marks down the bison in the jungle. And a great feature of the cunning of these people is that they get themselves up in a way to hide their real natures—in fact, such is their ingenuity, that they pretend to go to the other extreme, and appear before their victims dressed just the very opposite of what one would expect in a shady character. They are, in fact, full of deceit. One day I had eaten my bun and drunk my glass of milk in about a second and a half, and was looking at books in a very interesting bookseller’s window that spread out into the street near that historic building known as the Mansion House, where the Lord Mayor lives. I had found a sixpenny book about Mr. Henry Irving’s art and was just going to purchase it, bringing from my pocket a five-pound note to do so, when an old man of a religious and gentlemanly appearance spoke to me. But first, to calm the natural excitement of the reader at hearing me mention a five-pound note, I ought to explain that that morning was pay-day at the office—the first in which I had actively participated. The five-pound note was the first that I had ever earned, and it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to feel it in my pocket. This was natural.