I got a hansom and drove off, and every street
increased my gloom; gray houses with blinds drawn down, whole
thoroughfares almost desolate, and the foot-passengers who seemed to
stagger wearily along rather than walk, all made me feel a sinking at
heart. I put up for the night at a small hotel in a street leading from
the Strand, where my father had stayed on his few brief visits to town;
and when I went out after dinner, the real gayety and bustle of the
Strand and Fleet Street could cheer me but little, for in all this great
city there was no single human being whom I could claim even as an
acquaintance. I will not weary you with the history of the next year,
for the adventures of a man who sinks are too trite to be worth
recalling. My money did not last me long; I found that I must be neatly
dressed, or no one to whom I applied would so much as listen to me; and
I must live in a street of decent reputation if I wished to be treated
with common civility. I applied for various posts, for which, as I now
see, I was completely devoid of qualification; I tried to become a clerk
without having the smallest notion of business habits, and I found, to
my cost, that a general knowledge of literature and an execrable style
of penmanship are far from being looked upon with favor in commercial
circles. I had read one of the most charming of the works of a famous
novelist of the present day, and I frequented the Fleet Street taverns
in the hope of making literary friends, and so getting the
introductions which I understood were indispensable in the career of
letters. I was disappointed; I once or twice ventured to address
gentlemen who were sitting in adjoining boxes, and I was answered,
politely indeed, but in a manner that told me my advances were unusual. Pound by pound, my small resources melted; I could no longer think of
appearances; I migrated to a shy quarter, and my meals became mere
observances. I went out at one and returned to my room at two, but
nothing but a milk-cake had occurred in the interval. In short, I became
acquainted with misfortune; and as I sat amidst slush and ice on a seat
in Hyde Park, munching a piece of bread, I realized the bitterness of
poverty, and the feelings of a gentleman reduced to something far below
the condition of a vagrant. In spite of all discouragement I did not
desist in my efforts to earn a living. I consulted advertisement
columns, I kept my eyes open for a chance, I looked in at the windows of
stationers' shops, but all in vain. One evening I was sitting in a Free
Library, and I saw an advertisement in one of the papers. It was
something like this: "Wanted, by a gentleman a person of literary taste
and abilities as secretary and amanuensis. Must not object to travel." Of course I knew that such an advertisement would have answers by the
hundred, and I thought my own chances of securing the post extremely
small; however, I applied at the address given, and wrote to Mr. Smith,
who was staying at a large hotel at the West End. I must confess that my
heart gave a jump when I received a note a couple of days later, asking
me to call at the Cosmopole at my earliest convenience. I do not know,
sir, what your experiences of life may have been, and so I cannot tell
whether you have known such moments. A slight sickness, my heart beating
rather more rapidly than usual, a choking in the throat, and a
difficulty of utterance; such were my sensations as I walked to the
Cosmopole. I had to mention the name twice before the hall porter could
understand me, and as I went upstairs my hands were wet. I was a good
deal struck by Mr. Smith's appearance; he looked younger than I did, and
there was something mild and hesitating about his expression. He was
reading when I came in, and he looked up when I gave my name. "My dear
sir," he said, "I am really delighted to see you. I have read very
carefully the letter you were good enough to send me. Am I to understand
that this document is in your own handwriting?" He showed me the letter
I had written, and I told him I was not so fortunate as to be able to
keep a secretary myself. "Then, sir," he went on, "the post I advertised
is at your service. You have no objection to travel, I presume?" As you
may imagine, I closed pretty eagerly with the offer he made, and thus I
entered the service of Mr. Smith. For the first few weeks I had no
special duties; I had received a quarter's salary, and a handsome
allowance was made me in lieu of board and lodging. One morning,
however, when I called at the hotel according to instructions, my master
informed me that I must hold myself in readiness for a sea-voyage, and,
to spare unnecessary detail, in the course of a fortnight we had landed
at New York. Mr. Smith told me that he was engaged on a work of a
special nature, in the compilation of which some peculiar researches had
to be made; in short, I was given to understand that we were to travel
to the far West. After about a week had been spent in New York we took our seats in the
cars, and began a journey tedious beyond all conception. Day after day,
and night after night, the great train rolled on, threading its way
through cities the very names of which were strange to me, passing at
slow speed over perilous viaducts, skirting mountain ranges and pine
forests, and plunging into dense tracts of wood, where mile after mile
and hour after hour the same monotonous growth of brushwood met the eye,
and all along the continual clatter and rattle of the wheels upon the
ill-laid lines made it difficult to hear the voices of our
fellow-passengers. We were a heterogeneous and ever-changing company;
often I woke up in the dead of night with the sudden grinding jar of the
brakes, and looking out found that we had stopped in the shabby street
of some frame-built town, lighted chiefly by the flaring windows of the
saloon. A few rough-looking fellows would often come out to stare at the
cars, and sometimes passengers got down, and sometimes there was a party
of two or three waiting on the wooden sidewalk to get on board. Many of
the passengers were English; humble households torn up from the moorings
of a thousand years, and bound for some problematical paradise in the
alkali desert or the Rockies. I heard the men talking to one another of
the great profits to be made on the virgin soil of America, and two or
three, who were mechanics, expatiated on the wonderful wages given to
skilled labor on the railways and in the factories of the States. This
talk usually fell dead after a few minutes, and I could see a sickness
and dismay in the faces of these men as they looked at the ugly brush or
at the desolate expanse of the prairie, dotted here and there with
frame-houses, devoid of garden, or flowers or trees, standing all alone
in what might have been a great gray sea frozen into stillness.