I came to London just after the opening of the Parliamentary session of 1872, at a time when every nook and corner of the journalistic work-room was filled, and when the doors were besieged, as they always are at such a season, by scores of outsiders eager for a turn at the good things going. I forget now precisely how it came about, but I went to live at a frowsy caravanserai in Bouverie Street, an astonishingly dirty and disreputable hotel called the 'Sussex.' It is down now, and its site is occupied by the extended offices of the _Daily News_; but in its day it was the home of as much shabby gentility as could be found under any one roof in London. Beds were to be had there at threepence and sixpence. I remember no arrangement for meals, and certainly never troubled the establishment in that way myself. The linen had a look of having been washed in pea-soup and dried in a chimney, and the whole aspect of the house and its _clientèle_ was wo-begone and neglected to the last extreme. Paper and pen and ink are cheap enough, and I used to sit all day long in my bedroom, fireless in the winter weather, wrapped up in an ulster and with a counterpane about my knees, writing for bare life. I wrote verses grave and gay, special articles, leading articles, and leaderettes. These were delivered at all manner of likely and unlikely places, and came back again, like the curses and the chickens and the bad penny in the proverbs. I lived for weeks on hard-rinded rolls and thick chocolate, procured at an Italian restaurant on the opposite side of Fleet Street, and found myself admirably healthy on that simple diet. I wrote now and then to friends in the country, disguising my estate, and telling them what I was working at without hinting what became of the work when it was finished. One of my correspondents remonstrated with me for taking up my quarters in a hotel in that part of London, and advised me to try cheaper lodgings. Until I had something regular to rely upon, I was told, it was absurd to launch into an extravagance of that sort. I have often had to think how many hundreds of men, better equipped for the intellectual arena than I was, as plucky, as determined, and as full of hope, have gone down in the lonely and bitter sea of poverty in which I floated in those days. My breakfast expenditure of threepence, with a halfpenny to the waiter, secured me a look at the daily papers, and every morning I went back to that beastly bedroom to write at my dressing-table in denunciation of the Ministry, or to hold up to public contumely some unpaid justice of the peace who had given a hungry labourer six months for stealing twopenny-worth of turnips. I redressed countless wrongs on paper in that draughty garret; but nothing came of it There is no use in being too minute in narrating the history of that time. It was bad enough to begin with, and grew at last to be about as bad as it could be. That obliging uncle, who becomes your aunt when you