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: CHAFTERJII. ARRIVAL IN LONDON. I About seven o'clock in the morning, on the first day of the year 1816, the Chatham boat arrived in London. A sharp, damp, and foggy dawn very appropriately ushered in, to Mr. Samuel Jerrold, the three or four sad years he was destined to spend within the sound of Bow bell. His son Douglas, whose coat had been stolen from the cabin, and who, therefore, trudged, for the first time, along London streets hardly prepared for the fog or the cold, probably felt neither the sharpness of the wind nor the suffocating tendency of the fog. The scene was new to him, and all that is new is welcome to the young. Holding his sister by the hand, he walked the streets for some minutes on his own responsibility, while his father stepped aside to comfort himself with a draught of purl. The young middy might well try thus early, even for a few minutes, the effect of walking alone in London ! A house in Broad Court, Bow Street, received the family—a humble lodging enough; but the general peace, and the confiscation of the land upon which the theatre stood, had ruined them utterly. Fortune, food, had to be sought. Let me not lightly pass over this time. It is the key to the after-character of him whose life I have to set before the reader. This Broad Court, withits dingy houses; its troops of noisy, ragged boys ; its brawls and cries ; was ray father's first impression of the great city. Here, too, for the first time, he came to hob- and-nob with the stern realities of the world. As yet he had passed a youth not remarkable for its vicissitudes, and he had been two years in his Majesty's navy; in the position, and with the prospects, of a gentleman. When a home is broken up it is the position of the children that oppresses your heart. You see their neat clothe...