Chapter 26

FORTY-FIVE YEARS.

For the most part, what befell Israel during his forty years wanderings
in the London deserts, surpassed the forty years in the natural
wilderness of the outcast Hebrews under Moses.

In that London fog, went before him the ever-present cloud by day, but
no pillar of fire by the night, except the cold column of the monument,
two hundred feet beneath the mocking gilt flames on whose top, at the
stone base, the shiverer, of midnight, often laid down.

But these experiences, both from their intensity and his solitude, were
necessarily squalid. Best not enlarge upon them. For just as extreme
suffering, without hope, is intolerable to the victim, so, to others, is
its depiction without some corresponding delusive mitigation. The
gloomiest and truthfulest dramatist seldom chooses for his theme the
calamities, however extraordinary, of inferior and private persons;
least of all, the pauper's; admonished by the fact, that to the craped
palace of the king lying in state, thousands of starers shall throng;
but few feel enticed to the shanty, where, like a pealed knuckle-bone,
grins the unupholstered corpse of the beggar.

Why at one given stone in the flagging does man after man cross yonder
street? What plebeian Lear or Oedipus, what Israel Potter, cowers there
by the corner they shun? From this turning point, then, we too cross
over and skim events to the end; omitting the particulars of the
starveling's wrangling with rats for prizes in the sewers; or his
crawling into an abandoned doorless house in St. Giles', where his hosts
were three dead men, one pendant; into another of an alley nigh
Houndsditch, where the crazy hovel, in phosphoric rottenness, fell
sparkling on him one pitchy midnight, and he received that injury,
which, excluding activity for no small part of the future, was an added
cause of his prolongation of exile, besides not leaving his faculties
unaffected by the concussion of one of the rafters on his brain.

But these were some of the incidents not belonging to the beginning of
his career. On the contrary, a sort of humble prosperity attended him
for a time; insomuch that once he was not without hopes of being able to
buy his homeward passage so soon as the war should end. But, as stubborn
fate would have it, being run over one day at Holborn Bars, and taken
into a neighboring bakery, he was there treated with such kindliness by
a Kentish lass, the shop-girl, that in the end he thought his debt of
gratitude could only be repaid by love. In a word, the money saved up
for his ocean voyage was lavished upon a rash embarkation in wedlock.

Originally he had fled to the capital to avoid the dilemma of
impressment or imprisonment. In the absence of other motives,