urned.

Where the handsome offices of the _Daily News_ now stand in Bouverie
Street, there was at that time a doleful place of resort for life's
failures. It was called the Sussex Hotel. The _habitues_ of the place
were for the most part broken journalists and barristers, some of whom
were men of considerable native talent and attainment. They were mostly
given to drink, but they contrived to maintain at least such an outward
semblance of respectability as enabled them to loaf about the Fleet
Street offices and bars without being actually the objects of derision.
I do not suppose that there is anywhere at this time such a contingent
to be found in London. I went to live amongst them for economy's sake.
We each paid sixpence a night in advance for a bed, the linen of
which had a look of having been washed in tobacco juice and dried up a
chimney. When a guest had paid his money, he was supplied with a key and
about an inch of thin candle, which was affixed by its own grease to a
broken shard of pottery. I spent about six weeks there and during the
latter part of the time at least, my one daily meal consisted of a
hard-rinded roll and thick chocolate. My belongings had all dwindled
away, and at last I found myself penniless and homeless in the midst of
London.

It is not, when all is said and done, a very dreadful thing for a
healthy man to be without food for a few days, nor is it such a hardship
as the fastidious might fancy to snatch one's nightly rest on the
benches of the Embankment. I passed four nights there, chivied with the
rest of the abject crowd by the ubiquitous policeman with his eternal
"Wake up, move on there!" and for four days I was entirely without food.
I can quite honestly say that I cared very little for these things
in themselves, but where the iron enters into a man's soul in such
conditions is when he feels that his degradation is unmerited and knows
that he has powers within him which, if he could find a vent for
them, might lead him on to fame and fortune. The exasperating raging
bitterness of this, the grudging envy with which he looks at those more
fortunate than himself, whose intellectual equipment he despises, these
are the things which sear the heart.

I had resolved--let come what might come--that I would never go home to
confess myself a failure. The thing, of course, might have had a tragic
ending; there have been thousands of tragic endings to such enterprises
as that in which I was