It was a Sunday in London--gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look to them out of windows in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the plague were in the city, and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. CHARLES DICKENS. When, as a boy of ten (driven from Paris by General Trochu's proclamation before the siege as a _bouche inutile_), I first set my eyes on the world's metropolis, my impressions were not favourable. Ugh! that first Sunday in London! It was like a day of death, a day among the tombs. What a change from the Paris of the Third Empire! I had been suddenly translated from an airy, flower-festooned apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, to a dirty brick lodging-house in the Pentonville Road, with a soot-garden in front and a dingy penitentiary across the way. Never before had I seen a brick house, soot-garden, or penitentiary; and novelty for once failed to lure my youthful eye. It was then that the purple-faced landlady in the rusty black gown assured my father that the place was "exceedingly respectable." "What is that?" asked my elder brother John in French--"_c'est tres quoi?_" "Respectable," repeated my father. "Respectable," quoth John. "What we call _triste, hein_?" And my father, who was ever grave as a tetrarch, smiled. I knew only two or three English phrases then, such as "I am pretty and vell; how vos you?" "If you please," "menny of zem," etc. etc. Never till then had I heard the British national word; and when my father explained that "respectability" meant "_une nature honorable_," we boys looked out at the soot-garden and penitentiary, and marvelled why honour in London looked so dirty. The next day was Sunday, and our landlady furnished us with the name of a "most respectable" church near Clerkenwell Prison. But John expressed a suspiciously fervent and pious desire to attend service at St. Paul's Cathedral, and when my mother looked hard at him he blushed. That settled it. I was ordered to put on my new Sunday boots, and go with him. When we got outside, John took the precaution, by way of a start, to box my ears for being an artful little _mouchard_, and then set off as fast as he could go, with a view to leaving me behind. His legs were long, mine were short, and I wore my Sunday boots. Besides, I was hindered by rude insular boys, who stood in my way pointing to my Parisian headgear, and shouting barbarian phrases which I have since recognised as "Who's your 'atter?"