Dr. Thompson took Francis away from college and next set him to work with a surgical instrument maker. There he remained two weeks. His next attempt at work was as agent for a new encyclopaedia. This book it took him two months to read through, and he did not sell a single copy. His father then told him that he must enlist. Thompson obeyed without a word. He was rejected as physically unfit, but not before he had gone through a weary period of marching and drill in the endeavour to expand his chest to the necessary inches. Thompson once more returned home, as he did from each successive failure, saying simply, "I have not succeeded," and vouchsafing no explanation. There were apparently no confidences between Thompson and his father; Dr. Thompson knew nothing of his son's literary ambitions. His comment when later he found his son welcomed as a poet was: "If the lad had but told me!" but it is doubtful, as Mr. Mills says, "that the worthy doctor regarded the greenest of poetic laurels as a fair exchange for a thriving medical practice." This time Thompson's reception seems to have been unusually chilling, and in a hopeless mood he left home without saying good-bye, and started for London with no money but his fare, and with no baggage but a volume of Blake in one pocket and Aeschylus in another. Friendless, incompetent, aimless, he threw himself into the maw of the great city which has devoured so many poets, and soon plumbed the very depths of poverty and despair. For three years he drifted about London, sinking continually lower, and the astonishing thing is that he came through the ordeal alive. His feeble attempts at finding and doing "work" soon ceased, and then he knew what it meant to walk in rags and herd with the outcasts of the street, to sleep in a fourpenny doss-house, or, if he had no money, on the Embankment, to suffer hunger and pain and cold. An attempt to establish himself as a boot-black met with the usual ill-success that attended all Thompson's practical efforts, and the time came when, for a week, his only earning was sixpence for holding a horse's head. Later still, he was on the streets day and night successively for fifteen days, and sank into a kind of stupor, moving about in a sort of half-consciousness as in a walking nightmare.