Alone in London, he had come to his fierce fight: not for fame, but for bread. Through all his squalid wanderings in the hard times, and all his sordid trials, he sustained his cheerfulness, and in a selfless supremacy ever strove to bestow on other lives the faith and courage his own bright heart never wholly lost. How he lived in these early days in London no one knows, and the tale of want, care, and humiliation incident to gnawing peril and privation made a story too agonising for him, open as he was, ever to fully reveal. He said one day very quietly: "When I lived among the beggars in Axe Lane." He may have laughed as he said the words. He must have shuddered. The laugh was a selfless sacrifice. The shudder was real and to the very last too true, for painful memory was vivid. We cannot tell whether, like Shakespeare, he held the reins of horses, standing outside taverns and theatres; or whether he carried bags for pence, ran errands, gambled for his bread, or begged for shelter. Here was a sweet, weak, pure, and gentle, sympathetic lad, only a boy in heart and strength, and not even a child in that hardness life demands, stepping he knew not whither, meeting the world in an actual and visible solitude, and a loneliness of soul beyond the force of words to tell. There are those who, having passed their twentieth year, are already men of mark and power. Not such a one was poor Noll. Through ceaseless dependence and uncertainty in both his purpose and his position in life, he tardily gained that dignity and validity that attends the realisation of man's estate. With Goldsmith now one eager and despairing quest for work followed hard upon another, and disappointments in rapid and relentless succession. After wandering on from door to door, and hope to its scattering, and chance to its dispelling, he obtained his first situation as a dispenser in a chemist's shop. He lost opportunities and failed to create confidence, more than anything through the forlornness of his appearance, and the too obvious simplicity of his bearing. Then he heard of an old friend, a warm-hearted Edinburgh student, a certain Dr. Sleigh. To this generous man he bent his steps. As soon as he was recognized, he was received into the home of his former companion, and welcomed with all that brotherliness of which sterling friendship is capable.