The evening of his first reading was marked by an incident which nearly cut short my career. The hall where he was to read was full to the door when I arrived. With three ladies--who, like myself, had come too late--I was in danger of being excluded. A form was, however, brought in, and placed directly beneath the platform, so close to it that we had to incline our heads at an uncomfortable angle in order to see the reader's face. Suddenly, before the reading had proceeded very far, the heavy proscenium, which Dickens always carried about with him for the purpose of his readings, fell with a crash over me and the three ladies on the form. We were so near that the top of the proscenium happily fell beyond us, and we escaped with a severe fright. Years afterwards I was amused to read, in one of the published letters of Dickens to his sister-in-law, an account of this accident, in which the novelist told how his gasman had said afterwards: "The master stood it like a brick." But it was not upon the master, but upon me and the three ladies that that terrible proscenium suddenly descended. CHAPTER IV. FROM REPORTER TO EDITOR. First Visit to London--The Capital in 1862--Acquaintance with Sothern--Bursting of the Bradfield Reservoir--Attendance at Public Executions and at Floggings--Assuming the Editorship of the _Preston Guardian_--Political and Literary Influences--Great Speeches by Gladstone and Bright--Bright's Contempt for Palmerston--Robertson Gladstone Defends his Brother--Death of Abraham Lincoln--Meeting with his Granddaughter. My first visit to London was on the occasion of the opening of the International Exhibition of 1862. The abominable system of Parliamentary trains, which made it necessary that the third-class passenger should rise in the middle of the night if he had to make a journey of any length, was then in force. I had, therefore, to start at five o'clock in the morning in order that I might reach London in the evening. I can still recall some of the emotions of that journey. London was to me the city of all cities--the one great goal of the journalist's ambition. I took short views of life even then, but my secret hope, ever present to my mind, was that I might some day attain a post in connection with the London Press. As the crawling train came into the southern counties--farther south than I had ever been in my life before--I remember counting the milestones on the road, and suffering all the emotions of the youth in "Locksley Hall" as he draws nearer to the world's central point.