a scent of smouldering ash
which, whenever and wherever I have encountered it, has not failed to
bring back the scene in which I smelt it first. There is an odour less
easy to define, but just as easy to recognise, in the air of the morning
street; in the reek of horse and harness going up Snow Hill; in
a mingling of wet rot and dry rot in the station; in the acrid,
faintly-tinctured coffee smell at Oxford; in the scent of a London fog,
or the fragrance of a London egg--any one of which will infallibly take
me back to the scene and the time at which it was first perceived.

This, however, is an after-reflection; and here am I in London for the
first time as a free man, and, to my own mind, master of my destiny. It
really seems at moments as if one might pat it into any form one chose;
and it really seems at times as if one were an insect without wings
at the bottom of some unfathomable cranny. The fog of my first week
in London is, I believe, historic, and its five or six days of tearful
blindness and catarrh began to look as if they would reach to the very
crack of doom. Those fog-bound days, in which it was impossible for
a Midland-bred stranger to stray ten yards from his own door without
hopelessly losing himself, are amongst the most despondent and mournful
of my life. But, on a sudden, the dawning day revealed to me the other
side of the street in an air as crisp, clear, and invigorating as the
heart of any youngster, inured to the smoke of the Black Country, could
wish for. Then what a joy it was to walk about amongst the bustling
crowds, reading stories in the faces of the passers-by, and identifying
scores and hundreds of people with the creatures of the great fiction
writers. Above all, the people whose life-long friendship we owe to the
works of Charles Dickens declared themselves. I lived off the Goswell
Road, and that fact alone predisposed me to recognise Mr Pickwick in any
spectacled, well-fleshed old gentleman of benevolent aspect. I tumbled
across Sam Weller constantly. I was quite certain as to the living
personality of one of the Cheeryble twins. When I knew him he was a
tailor in Cheapside. It was merely by the accident of time that the
shadows I identified with living men had assumed a dress dissimilar to
that of the early Victorian era, and I think I may honestly say that for
a month or two, at least, my London was mainly peopled by the creations
of the author of _Pickwick, Little Dorrit_, and _Domb