At that time, fired by a small journalistic success, I insulted the senior partner of the City firm which employed me at a wicked wage, and took my departure. Things went well, for a time, and then went ill. There were feverish paradings of Fleet Street, when I turned out vivid paragraphs for the London Letter of a Northern daily, receiving half a crown apiece. They were wonderful paragraphs. Things seemed to happen in London every day unknown to other newspapers; and in the service of that journal I was, by the look of it, like Sir Boyle Roche's bird, in five places at once. But that stopped, and for some time I drifted, in a sort of mental and physical stupor, all about highways and byways. I saw naked life in big chunks. I dined in Elagabalian luxury at Lockhart's on a small ditto and two thick 'uns, and a marine. I took midnight walks under moons which--pardon the decadent adjectives--were pallid and passionate. I am sure they were at that time: all moons were. Then, the lightness of my stomach would rise to the head, so that I walked on air, and brilliance played from me like sparks from a cat's back. I could have written wonderful stuff then--had I the mind. I wandered and wandered; and that is about all I remember. Bits of it come back to me at times, though.... I remember, finally, sloughing through Bishopsgate into Norton Folgate, when I was down to fifteen-and-sixpence. In Norton Folgate I found a timid cocoa-room, and, careless of the future, I entered and gorged. Sausages ... mashed ... bread ... tomatoes ... pints of hot tea.... Too, I found sage wisdom in the counter-boy. He had been through it. We put the matter into committee, and it was discussed from every possible point of view. I learnt that I could get a room for next to nothing round about there, and that there was nothing like studying the "Sits. Vacant" in the papers at the Library; or, if there was anything like it, it was trusting to your luck. No sense in getting the bleeding pip. As he was eighteen and I was seventeen, I took his counsel to heart, and, fired with a repletion of sausage and potato, I stalked lodgings through the forests of Kingsland Road and Cambridge Road. In the greasy, strewn highway, where once the Autonomie Club had its home, I struck Cudgett Street--a narrow, pale cul-de-sac, containing fifty dilapidated cottages; and in the window of the first a soiled card: "One Room to Let." The doorstep, flush with the pavement, was crumbling. The door had narrowly escaped annihilation by fire; but the curtains in the front-room window were nearly white. Two bare-armed ladies, with skirts hiked up most indelicately behind them, were sloshing down their respective doorsteps, and each wall was ragged with five or six frayed heads thrust from upper windows for the silken dalliance of conversation. However, it was sanctuary. It looked cheap. I knocked.