22 BY MEADOW AND STREAM. 



ceremony repeated with another blackthorn. This 

 blackened thorn was supposed to be the emblem of 

 good luck to the household, and to act as a charm 

 against mildew or smut in wheat. 



My last recollection of the old gentleman was 

 seeing him in his armchair with a cat on each knee 

 and one on each shoulder, all asleep and all happy. 



MY FIRST JOURNEY TO LONDON. 



On the 2Qth of May (Oak-apple day), 1846, my 

 father drove me ten miles across country to take the 

 coach for a sixty miles' drive to Birmingham. It was 

 a lovely day. 



This was about the time of the great railway mania. 

 The top of the coach was full of railway engineers, 

 surveyors, and speculators, and their talk was of new 

 lines, cuttings, tunnels, and viaducts. It was the 

 opening out of a new world to me, who had never 

 seen a railway. I travelled by train from Birmingham 

 to London, and my first night in a second-rate hotel 

 near the station (for I had arrived late at night) I am 

 never likely to forget. I suppose my wholesome flesh 

 was a sort of godsend to starved inhabitants of that 

 bed of a kind that I had never even heard of before. 



I had quitted my dear old home with regret, and 

 that night I bitterly repented having left it. I was, I 

 am sure, the first and the least worthy of all my race 

 who had ever dwelt in London, and I longed, how I 

 longed, to leave it. But I had come to London to 

 make my fortune (that elusive phantom), like many 

 another ambitious youth. I had brought with me a 

 good constitution, a "little Latin and less Greek" in 



