ame that David Copperfield describes as in
the City Road; and the account of the sales, as they actually occurred
and were told to me long before David was born, was reproduced word for
word in his imaginary narrative: "The keeper of this bookstall, who
lived in a little house behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to
be violently scolded by his wife every morning. More than once, when I
went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, with a
cut in his forehead or a black eye bearing witness to his excesses
overnight (I am afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink); and he, with a
shaking hand, endeavoring to find the needful shillings in one or other
of the pockets of his clothes, which lay upon the floor, while his wife,
with a baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never left off
rating him. Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he would ask me to
call again; but his wife had always got some (had taken his, I dare say,
while he was drunk), and secretly completed the bargain on the stairs,
as we went down together."

The same pawnbroker's shop, too, which was so well known to David,
became not less familiar to Charles; and a good deal of notice was here
taken of him by the pawnbroker, or by his principal clerk who officiated
behind the counter, and who, while making out the duplicate, liked of
all things to hear the lad conjugate a Latin verb and translate or
decline his _musa_ and _dominus_. Everything to this accompaniment went
gradually; until, at last, even of the furniture of Gower Street number
four there was nothing left except a few chairs, a kitchen table, and
some beds. Then they encamped, as it were, in the two parlors of the
emptied house, and lived there night and day.

All which is but the prelude to what remains to be described.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "I shall cut this letter short, for they are playing Masaniello in
the drawing-room, and I feel much as I used to do when I was a small
child a few miles off, and Somebody (who, I wonder, and which way did
_She_ go, when she died) hummed the evening hymn to me, and I cried on
the pillow,--either with the remorseful consciousness of having kicked
Somebody else, or because still Somebody else had hurt my feelings in
the course of the day." From Gadshill, 24 Sept. 1857. "Being here again,
or as much here as anywhere in particular."

[2] "The mistress of the establishment holds no place in our memory;
but, rampant on one eternal doo