they could never find me there, and send
after me before my time was up, to say "Mr.
Gray wanted me," or that I was "to make
haste." The granaries were too far off. I
could come in there any day, and be sure of
not being Drabbed or Skurryed for a couple
of hours. Peace was in its dingy boxes;
Lethe was in its coffee, whereof whoso drank
straightway fell into a dream in which there
were no granaries, nor barred windows, nor
rats, nor Masters, nor head clerks. What
a glorious thing to have got a holiday, and to
have spent the whole day in Cogswell's! How
often, I wondered, should I have been obliged
to renew my order for a cup of coffee and a roll,
to be tolerated there from morn till night. I
might have chosen a wet day, and pretended to
be always getting up to go away and always
hindered by the weather, but I could never
get through a roll every two hours; and I
used to fancy that Cogswell wondered—as it
was—how I could have the face to sit, eating
and reading there, at two-pence an hour. I
suspected he talked about me to the
customers when I was gone, and contemplated
declining to admit boys any more. I speculated
upon how he would first intimate to me
the unfeeling determination. Would he write
it up in large letters, and silently point to it
one day when I came in: or would he let me
down before the customers, by calling it out
to me from his place among the cups and
saucers, and sending me away red in the face?
It was long before I became sufficiently free
from these doubts to feel quite at my ease in
Cogswell's old established coffee-shop.

And yet, Heaven knows, I was meek and
timid enough to conciliate the greediest of
coffee-house-keepers, or the severest of regular
customers. Old Perks did at last—after staring
at me in silence for eight months—voluntarily
admit that I was a "very well-conducted and
unobtrusive youth." During all that time
no one had ever heard me bespeak the paper,
after any one. I had my opinions, and heard
some say things there that I thought very
foolish; but I never ventured to make a
remark. I have watched the Morning Herald
in the hands of old Perks, and hoped that he
would go away and leave it there before I
went. I have seen him, when I knew that
he had quite done with it, lay it on the table
and accidentally place his spectacles upon it,
and I have never dared to touch it till that
token of possession was removed. If an
empty box were to be found, I never went
into a box where another person was sitting.
If I had hung my hat up at the bottom of
some box, and a customer came and sat
there, making it impossible to get it again
without disturbing that customer, I would
stretch my time to the utmost limits before I
could make up my mind to ask him to move.

Cogswell's took in Blackwood, the Gentleman's,
the Penny Magazine, and the Mirror,
published by Mr. Limbird in the Strand, to
whom I sent an epigram (for the Mirror
liked epigrams) in the year 1833; and which
I am not aware that he ever published,
though I looked for it every week for a
twelvemonth. Blackwood had fine stories
in him; and Christopher North with his
crutch, was a great fact to me. The
Gentleman's I admired at first; but too
many Discoveries of remarkable Urns in the
county of Norfolk tired me. The Penny
Magazine was my favourite. Its interesting
bits of travels, and accounts of popular
superstitions, and biographical sketches,
determined me to be a great and wise man,
in spite of Skurry's low estimate of my
abilities. To have my name in a Penny
Magazine! Wouldn't Skurry be savage then?
Wouldn't old Drab be anxious, lest one day I
should tell the whole world how he had
served me? I had dreamed of annoying him
by becoming immensely rich; by having a
horse and dashing past his window, several
times a day; but that was a vulgar revenge,
compared with this. And all these things
were somehow connected with the Penny
Magazine. No wonder I liked that publication.
No wonder that it is a pleasure to me
to this day—and will be for many a day to
come I hope—to open an old volume, and
turn over its pages—starting a whole covey
of fluttering memories, and lingering fondly
over its views of the Peak of Teneriffe, the
Peter Botte Mountain with people—like
ants, with little ladders—climbing up it;
its portraits of Jupiter Tonans and the
Saxon Deities, who gave names to the days
of the week; its Maccaroni Eaters; its
Tunny Fishery; its Cromwell Dissolving
the Long Parliament; its Method of
Curing Anchovies—droll woodcuts, which
Corboy (a regular customer) was always
admiring; saying, "Upon my word, they do
bring these wood engravings to a wonderful
degree of perfection, they do indeed. They
are very little inferior to copperplate."

I was a favourite of Corboy's. He would
invite me to play at chess with him
sometimes, with an old red and white bone set of
chessmen, compounded of two sets of different
sizes with some of its knights' horses heads
broken off, a queen insecurely stuck upon
her pedestal with a bit of red sealing-wax,
and two pawns missing, which we supplied
with two sixpences. He said I was "very
strong indeed; very strong," but he never
failed to beat me. I believe most of the
customers liked me, at last. Drew did, I
know. Drew was in some way connected
with the Ecclesiastical Courts. He said he
was not more than forty, but he looked fifty,
in his white stock, and shirt with a dozen
plaits to an inch. His faith was great in
Cogswell's; and when I told him the story of
my first coming there, he became my friend
from that day. He recollected Mrs. Cogswell,
poor thing, and, "she was a very talented
woman. It was a bad day for Cogswell
when he lost her." I don't believe any one