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Introduction.

I cannot recollect the precise day, but it was some time in the month of November 1839, that I took one of my usual rambles without design or destination.  I detest a premeditated route—­I always grow tired at the first mile; but with a free course, either in town or country, I can saunter about for hours, and feel no other fatigue but what a tumbler of toddy and a pipe can remove.  It was this disposition that made me acquainted with the fraternity of the “Puffs.”  I would premise, gentle reader, that as in my peregrinations I turn down any green lane or dark alley that may excite my admiration or my curiosity—­hurry through glittering saloons or crowded streets—­pause at the cottage door or shop window, as it best suits my humour, so, in my intercourse with you, I shall digress, speculate, compress, and dilate, as my fancy or my convenience wills it.  This is a blunt acknowledgment of my intentions; but as travellers are never sociable till they have cast aside the formalities of compliment, I wished to start with you at the first stage as an old acquaintance.  The course is not usual, and, therefore, I adopt it; and it was by thus stepping out of a common street into a common hostel that I became possessed of the materiel of those papers, which I trust will hereafter tend to cheat many into a momentary forgetfulness of some care.  I have no other ambition; there are philosophers enough to mystify or enlighten the world without my “nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips” being thrust into the cauldron, whose

    —­“Charms of powerful trouble,
  Like a hell-broth, boil and bubble.”

I had buttoned myself snugly in my Petersham (may the tailor who invented that garment “sleep well” whenever he “wears the churchyard livery, grass-green turned up with brown!”) The snow—­the beautiful snow—­fell pure and noiselessly on the dirty pavement.  Ragged, blue-faced urchins were scrambling the pearly particles together, and, with all the joyous recklessness of healthier childhood, carrying on a war less fatal but more glorious than many that have made countless widows and orphans, and, perhaps, one hero.  Little round doll-like things, in lace and ribbons, were thumping second-door windows with their tiny hands, and crowing with ecstasy at the sight of the flaky shower.  “Baked-tater” cans and “roasted-apple” saucepan lids were sputtering and frizzing in impotent rage as they waged puny war with the congealed element.  Hackney charioteers sat on their boxes warped and whitened; whilst those strange amalgams of past and never-to-come fashions—­the clerks of London—­hurried about with the horrid consciousness of exposing their costliest garments to the “pelting of the pitiless storm.”  Evening stole on.  A London twilight has nothing of the pale grey comfort that is diffused by that gradual change from day to night which I have experienced when seated by the hearth or the open window of a rural