After work Author:Edward Marston Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II My First Journey To London FIND, by reference to the leaf of an old diary accidentally preserved, that on June 1st, 1846, my father drove me acr... more »oss country to take the " Red Rover" coach from the King's Arms, Leominster, for about sixty miles' drive to Birmingham. It was a lovely day. This was about the time of the great railway mania. The coach was full of railway engineers, surveyors, and speculators, and their talk was of new lines, cuttings, tunnels, and viaducts. This 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) 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 before even heard of. 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 my head, a little money in my pocket, a good conscience, full trust in Providence, and a determination to work. My good mother had died a year before I left home, and shortly after my dear old father gave up his farm and retired to another county. Only once after many years did I find the opportunity of revisiting the scenes of my childhood, and then all was changed, All, all, were gone, the old familiar faces. All my uncles and aunts were dead—my father alone survived. He was born a hundred and thirteen years ago, ...« less