Excerpt from Wine and Walnuts, Vol. 1 of 2: Or, After Dinner Chit-Chat
Yes, young men and maidens, I was born more than eighty years ago, and have as distinct a recollection of the appearance of old lon don, of London as it was, as though in one vast Panorama, it stood now displayed before my eyes; and the events of the greater part of this long period are to me as of redent date. A journal, which I have occasionally kept, has helped the powers of reminiscence, so that past images by its aid, like the new mode of perpe tuating impressions by the steel cylinder in this stupendous age of invention, are never worn out, but the rather are ever being renewed. And this, I humbly conceive, is the principal member in that extraordinary machine, deno minated memory.
My father was a weaver, and resided in a part of the metropolis, in the very heart of a cluster of old buildings; his workshops were picturesque and rude, and would have furnished abundant subjects for the pencil of a Jan Stein, a Teniers, a Gerrard Douw, a Brauwer, or Ostade. Plastered walls, grotesque implements, nooks crowded with hour-glasses, obsolete tobacco-pipes, crazy lanterns, broken pitchers.
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