midnight
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 .