 any of those preparers of
cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many standard country legends, as
doing a lively retail business in the Metropolis; nor did it mark him out as the
prey of ring-droppers, pea and thimble-riggers, duffers, touters, or any of
those bloodless sharpers, who are, perhaps, a little better known to the Police.
He fell into conversation with no gentleman, who took him into a public-house,
where there happened to be another gentleman, who swore he had more money than
any gentleman, and very soon proved he had more money than one gentleman, by
taking his away from him: neither did he fall into any other of the numerous
mantraps which are set up, without notice, in the public grounds of this city.
But he lost his way. He very soon did that; and in trying to find it again, he
lost it more and more.
    Now, Tom, in his guileless distrust of London, thought himself very knowing
in coming to the determination that he would not ask to be directed to
Furnival's Inn, if he could help it; unless, indeed, he should happen to find
himself near the Mint, or the Bank of England; in which case, he would step in,
and ask a civil question or two, confiding in the perfect respectability of the
concern. So on he went, looking up all the streets he came near, and going up
half of them; and thus, by dint of not being true to Goswell Street, and filing
off into Aldermanbury, and bewildering himself in Barbican, and being constant
to the wrong point of the compass in London Wall, and then getting himself
crosswise into Thames Street, by an instinct that would have been marvellous if
he had had the least desire or reason to go there, he found himself, at last,
hard by the Monument.
    The Man in the Monument was quite as mysterious a being to Tom as the Man in
the Moon. It immediately occurred to him that the lonely creature who held
himself aloof from all mankind in that pillar like some old hermit, was the very
man of whom to ask his way. Cold, he might be; little sympathy he had, perhaps,
with human passion - the column seemed too tall for that; but if Truth didn't
live in the base of the Monument, notwithstanding Pope's couplet about the
outside of it, where in London (thought Tom) was she likely to be found!
    Coming close below the pillar, it was a great encouragement to Tom to
