The first weeks in London, however, were so full of new sensations and agreeable distractions, that he had scarcely been a fortnight away from Laysford when it looked like a year. To walk down Fleet Street and the Strand each day, or to thread the old byways between the Embankment and Holborn, with the knowledge that no excursion train was to rush him off northward at the end of fourteen days, was a pleasure which only the provincial settling in London could enjoy. How he had longed for years to tread these pavements as a resident, and not merely as a gaping visitor. His feet gripped them while he walked, as though he thought at every stride, "Ye are firm beneath me at last, O Streets of London!" Fleet Street, he knew in his heart, was outwardly as shabby a thoroughfare as ever served for the main artery of a great city, but he also knew that if the buildings were mean and the crowd that surged along its pavements as common to the eye as any in the frowsiest provincial city, there was more romance behind many of these shabby windows which bore the names of journals, famous and obscure, than in stately Whitehall or in Park Lane. The hum of printing-presses from dingy basements, the smell of printer's ink from many open doors, had a charm for him which perversely recalled the scent of new-mown hay in a Hampton meadow long years before. At first, he rarely passed a street without noting its name, an odd building without finding something to engage his interest, a man of uncommon aspect without wondering who he might be--what paper did he edit? But soon his daily walk from his lodgings in Woburn Place to the office of the _Watchman_ opposite the Law Courts was performed with less attention to the common objects of the route. A sausage shop hard by his office, sending forth at all hours of the day a strong odour of frying fat and onions, remained the freshest of his impressions; he never passed it without thinking of its impertinence in such a quarter; but one day he discovered that it was not without claim to literary associations. A young man with a chin that had required a shave for at least three days, wearing a shabby black mackintosh suggestive of shabbier things below, and boots much down at heel, came out of the shop with the aroma of sausage and onion strong upon him, and the fag-end of a savoury mouthful in the act of descending his throat. Something in the features of this dilapidated person struck Henry as oddly familiar, so that he glanced at him intently, and looked back, still puzzling as to who the fellow could be, when he found the shabby one looking at him, and evidently equally exercised concerning his identity. After a moment's hesitation, Henry walked back to him, and the sausage-eater flushed as he said: "Why, Hen--Mr. Charles--can it be you? I knew you were in London, and had half a mind to call on you, but you--well--" The reason why was too obvious to call for explanation.