In 1885, when he was twenty-six years old, Francis decided to leave home. After a week in Manchester he requested and received from his father the price of a railway ticket for London. The trip to the vast and strange city must have been made with only the vaguest of plans for the future. The despairing youth seemed to have no other purpose than to rid his father of his vexatious presence. There were friends in London, on one of whom Francis was directed to call for a weekly allowance from home. But a temperamental reluctance kept the young man away from those who could help him, and even the weekly allowance after a while came to be unclaimed. The rough, cyclonic forces of the huge city caught this helpless child of a man's years in the full swing of their blind sweep and played sad tricks with him. In a period extending over nearly three years Francis Thompson led the life of a vagrant in the streets and alleys. He made one or two brave essays at regular work of the most commonplace character, but without success. The worn copies of Aeschylus and Blake in the pockets of this ragged and gaunt roustabout contained no useful hints for the difficulties of the peculiar situation; its harshness could be transmuted into temporary and blessed oblivion by a drug whenever the means for purchase could be acquired. The Guildhall Library was much frequented until shabbiness was excluded by the policeman. This outcast poet, approaching thirty years of age, was at various times a bootblack, a newsboy, a vendor of matches, a nocturnal denizen of wharves and lounger on the benches of city-parks. His cough-racked frame was the exposed target of cold and rain and winds. He became used to hunger. At one time a six-pence, for holding a horse, was his only earnings for a week. It was while he was aimlessly roaming the streets one night almost delirious from starvation that a prosperous shoe-merchant, benevolently engaged in religious rescue-work, came across Thompson, and, struck by the incongruity of his gentle speech, induced him to accept employment in his shop. But one cannot allow business to suffer on account of an inveterate blunderer, even though the blunderer wear wings and has endeared himself to the family. Mr. McMaster, kindly Anglican lay-missionary, who deserves grateful remembrance for recognizing and temporarily helping merit under the most deceptive disguise, was obliged much against his inclination to dismiss Francis and to allow him to fall back into the pit of squalor and vagabondage.