My Autobiography and Reminiscences

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. MY CAREER DETERMINED. It was on a bleak March afternoon in 1835 that I started for London to make my fortune. My father had charge of me and a large portfolio of drawings, the exhibition of which to a well-selected judge was to devote me to art or tie me to an auctioneer's desk. I think at the present time an express train requires little more than four hours to make the journey from Leeds to London?fifty years ago the quickest Royal Mail passage occupied never less than twenty-four hours, and sometimes, in snowy winter weather especially, much longer; and the weariness, the cramp, the sleeplessness of those terrible times can with difficulty be realized by the luxurious travellers of to-day. My father and I were packed inside with two other passengers. Is this your son, sir ? said one. I believe so, replied my father. Then would you mind asking him. to manage his legs a little better ? I should like to get to London with some skin on my shins, if it's all the same to the young gentleman. We entered London through Highgate Archway, and my first impression of the great city was very disappointing?of course totally unlike the grand place I had imagined. The morning was foggy, and from a distance London resembled a huge gray bank of fog, with the dome of St. Paul's rising out of it; and when we entered it by dirty Islington, and rattled through streets each uglier and dirtier than the last, my illusions vanished. The coach stopped at the Saracen's Head, on Snow Hill. Each passenger claimed his luggage. My precious drawings had been preserved in a folio covered with some material like tarpaulin, impervious to the weather. Theywere safe, as were our portmanteaus. The hotel porter fetched us a lumbering hackney-coach, driven by a man whose coat ...