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thor’s vanity, and contemplating (not severely) the spikes on
the opposite wall.
As I walked to and fro daily between Southwark and
Blackfriars, and lounged about at meal-times in obscure
streets, the stones of which may, for anything I know, be
worn at this moment by my childish feet, I wonder how
many of these people were wanting in the crowd that used
to come filing before me in review again, to the echo of Cap-
tain Hopkins’s voice! When my thoughts go back, now, to
that slow agony of my youth, I wonder how much of the his-
tories I invented for such people hangs like a mist of fancy
over well-remembered facts! When I tread the old ground,
I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on be-
fore me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative
world out of such strange experiences and sordid things!