In Gower Street is a house associated with some scenes in the boy Dickens’s life, full of pain and misery. At No. 4 (it was then) Mrs. Dickens set up a school, or tried to do so. Mr. Allbut has found that, owing to a change in the numbering, the present No. 145 is the former No. 4. It is a strange feeling to stand before it and recall his own disastrous, even tragic account of this early misery:--“A house was soon found at No. 4, Gower Street North; a large brass plate on the door announced Mrs. Dickens’s establishment; and the result I can give in the exact words of the then small actor in the comedy, whose hopes it had raised so high. ‘I left at a great many other doors a great many circulars, calling attention to the merits of the establishment. Yet nobody ever came to school, nor do I recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was made to receive anybody. But I know that we got on very badly with the butcher and baker; that very often we had not too much for dinner; and that at last my father was arrested.’”... “Almost everything by degrees was pawned or sold, little Charles being the principal agent in these sorrowful transactions ... until at last, even of the furniture of Gower Street, No. 4, there was nothing left except a few chairs, a kitchen table, and some beds. Then they encamped, as it were, in the two parlours of the emptied house, and lived there night and day.” CHAPTER XIII. WATERLOO BRIDGE, THE LAW COURTS, ETC. Descending now to the river’s side we may think what amazing progress has been made in developing and adorning this noble stream, and all within twenty years! Three or four great monumental bridges, the almost Roman Embankment; the railway running under ground, the red-brick terraces at Chelsea, the palatial hotels at Charing Cross and Waterloo Bridge; Northumberland Avenue now built over on both sides, the many statues; the large and flourishing plane trees, and the gardens! What a change from the sludgy, sloppy land and foreshore, the mean barges and fringe of poor houses and shanties, and the “Adelphi Arches” of evil name! It has now quite an air of state and magnificence. The Embankment itself was a prodigious change from sedgy shore and “slob” land; but the change on the Embankment itself within a few years has been something extraordinary. Great terraces, vast rows of mansions are rising along its banks, and impress us with a sense of state and splendour. Within half a mile or so we have the rich and original Houses of Parliament, Westminster Bridge, the new Police Offices, the enormous terrace of Whitehall Mansions, the National Liberal Club, the great Hotel Metropole, the Charing Cross Bridge, the Adelphi Terrace, and the superb Waterloo Bridge. Strange to say, the other side of the river is old London still, mean warehouses and shanties disfiguring the shore.