adventures of which I had read at school, I met with more kindness than
the world generally gets credit for, and on the fourth day after my
departure, having slept soundly, if not magnificently, every night, and
eaten with an appetite which my mode of travelling was admirably
calculated to stimulate, reached the great metropolis, having preserved
of my patrimony, no less a sum than nine shillings and seven pence.

The bells of one of the churches in the city were ringing merrily as I
descended the heights of Islington; and were it not that my patronymic
Scropps never could, under the most improved system of campanology, be
jingled into any thing harmonious, I have no doubt I, like my great
predecessor Whittington, might have heard in that peal a prediction of
my future exaltation; certain it is I did not; and, wearied with my
journey, I took up my lodging for the night at a very humble house near
Smithfield, to which I had been kindly recommended by the driver of a
return postchaise, of whose liberal offer of the moiety of his bar to
town I had availed myself at Barnet.

As it is not my intention to deduce a moral from my progress in the
world at this period of my life, I need not here dilate upon the good
policy of honesty, or the advantages of temperance and perseverance, by
which I worked my way upwards, until after meriting the confidence of an
excellent master, I found myself enjoying it fully. To his business I
succeeded at his death, having several years before, with his sanction,
married a young and deserving woman, about my own age, of whose prudence
and skill in household matters I had long had a daily experience.

To be brief, Providence blessed my efforts and increased my means; I
became a wholesale dealer in every thing, from barrels of gunpowder down
to pickled herrings; in the civic acceptation of the word I was a