went to bed rather well
pleased with myself, after an hour spent in considering and adding to
sundry notes I had accumulated, for articles and sketches presently to
be written.

My hope was to be able to win a place in London journalism without
having any sort of an appointment. The very phrase 'free-lance'
appealed to my sense of the romantic. 'All the clever fellows are
free-lances, you know, in the Old Country.' I recalled many such
statements made to me in Sydney. Prudence might have led me to offer
myself for a post of some kind, if the editor to whom my letter of
introduction was addressed had been visible. But he was not in London;
and, in my heart, I was rather glad. It should be as a free agent, an
unknown adventurer in Grub Street, that I would win my journalistic
and literary spurs in the Old World. Other men had succeeded....

Musing in this hopeful vein I fell asleep, with never a hint of a
presentiment of what did actually lie before me. I suppose the
chiefest boon that mortals enjoy is just that negative blessing: their
total inability to see even so far into the future as to-morrow
morning.

IV

The compilation of anything like a detailed record of my first two
years in London would be a task to alarm a Zola. I could not possibly
face it; and, if I did, no good end could be served by such a
harrowing of my own feelings.

Such a compilation would be a veritable monument of squalid details;
of details infinitely mean and small, and, for the most part,
infinitely, unredeemedly ugly. Heaven knows I have no need to remind
myself by the act of writing of all those dismal details. Mere
poverty, starvation itself, even, may be lightsome things, by
comparison with the fetid misery which surrounded me during the major
part of those two years.

People say, with a smile or a sigh, as their mood dictates, that one
half the world does not know how the other half lives. So far is that
truism from comprehending the tragic reality of what poverty in London
means, that I have no hesitation in saying this: there is no wider
divergence between the lives of tigers and the lives of men than lies
between the lives of English people, whose homes in some quarters I
could name are separated by no more than the width of a street, a
mews, and, it may be, a walled strip of blackened grass and tree-trunks.

It is not simply that some well-to-do people are ignorant regarding
details of the lives of the poor. It is that n