I will not attempt to condone my fault. I will not attempt it, I say. At the moment when I should have been standing upon the doorstep of that humble habitation in which I sojourned for a space to welcome you with open arms and tears of joy, I was, owing to a combination of unfortunate circumstances, prone upon my bed in the first-floor front. I have not to warn you, my child, against the evils of drink, because in you glows the pure and temperate soul of your beloved mother. At the same time I should lack all the noble instincts of paternity if I did not remind you that “virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it.” That being so, do not allow yourself to be tempted by even a solitary glass of champagne. Water, pure, wholesome, pellucid water is the natural element of a being like yourself. But to come to the point of this letter. Two years ago, weary of being “a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,” I longed to be “heard no more.” I was at that time lodging in the house from which I write this despairing epistle. In a moment of folly I proposed to link myself in matrimony with my landlady’s daughter. The wretched woman accepted my hand. The Tragic Muse would be rendered dumb by the task of painting my misery ever since that inauspicious day. Ay, even Melpomene herself would stammer. One word, one word alone can indicate a dim and shadowy outline of my existence, and that one word is Hell. You will observe that I have resumed after a blank. That blank I wish to draw over my life for the last two years. But I have now reached a lower depth, a gloomier abyss, where in addition to all my other ills the spectre of famine looms above me. The wolf is scratching at the door. In a word, unless somehow or other I can raise the sum—a bagatelle for a Crœsus or a Rothschild, for me a burden heavier than Atlas bore—the sum of £158. 14s. 3½d. within the next week, I and my wife and my mother-in-law will be in the street. I do not for an instant imagine that you yourself have such a sum handy. You are like your father only a poor stroller. But it has occurred to me that you might be acquainted with some fortunate individual who could advance you this amount to save your father from destitution in company with the two least attractive companions that can be imagined for such an existence. I beg that you will not attempt to visit me. Since I gave up brandy, this house appears to me as what it undoubtedly is—a mercenary hovel. Yet I am “fain to hovel me with swine and rogues forlorn in short and musty straw.” In a word, I am better off in 544 Camberwell Road than “to be exposed against the warring winds, to stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder.” My beloved Nancy, do your best for me. Overlook my failings and come to my aid.