Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/308

268 268 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. breadth of the land. About two years later, Livesey first met young Cassell in a lecture-room or chapel in Manchester. " I remember quite well," he writes, "his standing on the right, just below or on the steps of the platform, in his working attire, with a fustian jacket and a white apron on " a young man of eighteen, in the honestest and best of uniforms his industrial regimentals. Into the temperance movement John "Cassell threw himself heart and soul ; and thinking that London would afford a wider field for temperance missionary labours, and that his daily bread, as an artizan, might there be more easily earned, he left Manchester and arrived in the Metropolis in October, 1836, and in a few days he found his way to the New Jerusalem school-rooms in the Westminster Bridge Road, and made his first public speech. He is described by one who was present, as " a gaunt stripling, poorly clad, and travel-stained ; plain, straightforward in speech, but broad in provincialism." Shortly afterwards, he is again to be traced to Milton Street, Barbican. But his appearance here marked an episode in his life ; for his energy, his evident thoroughness, and his frank confession that he carried all his worldly goods in his little wallet, and that the few pence in his pocket were his only fortune, at once gained him friends. A gentleman present took him to his own home, and shortly afterwards presented him to Mr. Meredith, who enrolled the young enthusiast forthwith among the paid band of temperance agents he was generously supporting at his own cost. With characteristic energy Cassell started on a temperance tour a journey fraught with difficulty and hardship; and a few months after we find a notice of him in