He found employment at Kew, and no doubt gloated over the floral splendours which he had come to see; but he returned to Farnham, and grew up in his father’s house. He made an appointment one day to meet some young friends and accompany them to Guildford Fair; but coming upon the high road as the London coach was passing in full career, he made up his mind on the spur of the moment to start for London. He arrived at the foot of Ludgate Hill with half-a-crown in his pocket. An honest hop-seller, who knew his father, took him by the hand, and he found work as an Attorney’s clerk. He speaks with unlimited abhorrence of the roguery he witnessed and the misery he endured in this place. “No part of my life,” he says, “has been totally unattended with pleasure except the eight or nine months I passed in Gray’s Inn. The office—for so the dungeon was called where I wrote—was so dark that on cloudy days we were obliged to burn candles. I worked like a galley-slave from five in the morning till eight or nine at night, and sometimes all night long. * * * When I think of the _saids_ and _so forths_, and the counts of tautology that I scribbled over—when I think of those sheets of seventy-two words, and those lines of two inches apart—my brain turns. Gracious Heaven! if I am doomed to be wretched, bury me beneath Iceland snows, and let me feed on blubber; stretch me under the burning Line, and deny me Thy propitious dews; nay, if it be Thy will, suffocate me with the infected and pestilential air of a democratic club-room; but save me, save me from the desk of an attorney!” Anything seemed better than this. William, acting again on the spur of the moment, enlisted. For more than a year he did duty at Chatham. Here he mastered grammar—an acquisition which he always regarded as the basis of his fortunes. He read also in a circulating library, swallowing enormous quantities of useful or useless knowledge, and laying it up in a memory of great tenacity. His father meanwhile was treated by him with heartless neglect. The old man had been offended by his running away, and appears to have made no effort to release him from the bondage of the attorney’s office. When he enlisted, however, his father relented, and wrote saying that the last hay-rick or pocket of hops at Farnham would be sold off to buy his discharge. But William vouchsafed no reply.