“Some day, if things happen as I should like, I am going to be an actor. It is a very difficult and uphill course of life, I know; but still, that is what I want to be, because I have a great feeling for the stage, and I shall often and often go to a theatre at night after I have done my day’s work, if you don’t mind—especially tragedies.” She didn’t laugh at the idea or scoff at it but she thought that I mustn’t fill my head with anything but fire insurance for the present. And of course I said that my first thought would be to work in the office and thoroughly earn my fifty pounds, and perhaps even earn more than I was paid, and so be applauded as a clerk rather out of the common. She took me to a tailor’s shop and I was measured for a tail-coat. I also had to get a top hat, such as men wear. I was tall and thin, and when the things came I put them on, and Aunt Augusta said that the effect was good, and Jane said that I looked “quite the man.” Aunt Augusta took me to several picture-galleries, and I went about a good deal by myself and made strange discoveries. Many people seemed to know that I was new in London without my telling them. Once I was nearly killed, showing how easily accidents happen. I had dropped a half-penny in Oxford Street, as I crossed the road, and was naturally stopping to pick it up, when the chest of a horse came bang against me and rolled me over. Fortunately, I was not in my new clothes. It was a hansom-cab horse that had run into me, and the driver pulled him up so that the horse simply skated along on his shoes and pushed me in front of him. Neither of us was hurt. A policeman appeared, and the driver asked me whether I thought the middle of Oxford Street was the right place for playing marbles. He meant it in an insulting way, as if I was still a boy. And I said that I had dropped a halfpenny and couldn’t surely be expected to leave it in the middle of London for anybody to pick up. The driver said that no doubt I was one of God’s chosen—meaning it rudely—and the people laughed, and the policeman told us all to move on. I went down a side street and cleaned myself up as well as I could. Then I found a lavatory and washed myself and got a shoeblack to rub the mud off me. London mud is very different from all other mud, not being pure, like country mud, but adulterated with oil and tar and many other products. The shoeblack charged three-pence, so it was an expensive accident for me, besides the danger.