So I lived a fugitive existence, a practical illustration of Irving's "Poor Devil Author," looking as often into pastry-shop windows, testing all manner of cheap Pickwickian veal-pies, breakfasting upon a chop, and supping upon a herring in my suburban residence, but keeping up pluck and chique so deceptively, that nobody in the place suspected me of poverty.
I went for some American inventors, to a rifle ground, and explained to the Lords of the Admiralty the merits of a new projectile; wrote letters to all the Continental sovereigns for an itinerant and independent embassador, and was at last so poor that my only writing papers were a druggist's waste bill-heads. An article with no other "backing" than this was fortunate enough to stray into the Cornhill Magazine. I found that its proprietor kept a banking-house in Pall Mall, and doubtful of my welcome on Cornhill, ventured one day in my unique American costume,—slouched hat, wide garments, and squared-toed boots,—to send to him directly my card. He probably thought from its face that a relative of Mr. Mason's was about to open an extensive account with him. As it was, once admitted to his presence, he could not escape me. The manuscript lay in his hands before he fully comprehended my purpose. He was a fine specimen of the English publisher,—robust, ruddy, good-naturedly acute,—and as he said with a smile that he would waive routine and take charge of my copy, I knew that the same hands had fastened upon the crude pages of Jane Eyre, and the best labors of Hazlitt, Ruskin, Leigh Hunt, and Thackeray.
Two more weary weeks elapsed; I found it pleasant to work, but very trying to wait. At the end my courage very nearly failed. I reached the era of self-accusation; to make myself forget myself I took long, ardent marches into the open country; followed the authors I had worshipped through the localities they had made reverend; lost myself in dreaminesses,—those precursors of death in the snow,—and wished myself back in the ranks of the North, to go down in the frenzy, rather than thus drag out a life of civil indigence, robbing at once my brains and my stomach.
One morning, as I sat in my little Islington parlor, wishing that the chop I had just eaten had gone farther, and taking a melancholy inventory of the threadbare carpet and rheumatic chairs, the door-knocker fell; there were steps in the hall; my name was mentioned.
A tall young gentleman approached me with a letter: I received him with a strange nervousness; was there any crime in my record, I asked fitfully, for which I had been traced to this obscure suburb for condign arrest and decapitation? Ha! ha! it was my heart, not my lips, that laughed. I could have cried out like Enoch Arden in his dying apostrophe:—
"A sail! a sail!
I am saved!"
for the note, in the publisher's own handwriting, said this, and more:—
"Dear Sir,—I shall be glad to send you fifteen guineas immediately, in return for your article on General Pope's Campaign, if the price will suit you."
But I suppressed my enthusiasm. I spoke patronizingly to the young gentleman. Dr. Johnson, at the brewer's vendue, could not have been more learnedly sonorous.
"You may say in return, sir, that the sum named will remunerate me."