Near the bottom of Parliament Street, and almost opposite the Home Office, is a narrow lane leading into Cannon Row, whence could be long seen the rear of the unfinished Opera house. At the corner stands a third-rate public-house, suggesting one of the extraordinary incidents in London, where meanness and opulence are ever side by side. This public-house is associated with the hardships of Dickens’s boyhood, in a very characteristic recollection, which he relates himself. “I remember, one evening (I had been somewhere for my father, and was going back to the Borough over Westminster Bridge), that I went into a public-house in Parliament Street, which is still there, though altered, at the corner of the short street leading into Cannon Row, and said to the landlord behind the bar, ‘What is your very best--the _very best_--ale, a glass?’ For the occasion was a festive one, for some reason: I forget why. It may have been my birthday, or somebody else’s. ‘Twopence,’ says he. ‘Then,’ says I, ‘just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.’ The landlord looked at me in return, over the bar, from head to foot, with a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the beer, looked round the screen and said something to his wife, who came out from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying me. Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire Terrace. The landlord in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. They asked me a good many questions, as what my name was, how old I was, where I lived, how I was employed, etc., etc. To all of which, that I might commit nobody, I invented appropriate answers. They served me with the ale, though I suspect it was not the strongest on the premises; and the landlord’s wife, opening the little half-door and bending down, gave me a kiss that was half-admiring and half-compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure.”