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Chapter III. Tom's meeting with the Prince.
Tom got up hungry, and sauntered hungry away, but with his thoughts
busy with the shadowy splendours of his night's dreams. He wandered here
and there in the city, hardly noticing where he was going, or what was
happening around him. People jostled him, and some gave him rough
speech; but it was all lost on the musing boy. By-and-by he found
himself at Temple Bar, the farthest from home he had ever travelled in
that direction. He stopped and considered a moment, then fell into his
imaginings again, and passed on outside the walls of London. The Strand
had ceased to be a country-road then, and regarded itself as a street,
but by a strained construction; for, though there was a tolerably compact
row of houses on one side of it, there were only some scattered great
buildings on the other, these being palaces of rich nobles, with ample
and beautiful grounds stretching to the river--grounds that are now
closely packed with grim acres of brick and stone.
Tom discovered Charing Village presently, and rested himself at the
beautiful cross built there by a bereaved king of earlier days; then
idled down a quiet, lovely road, past the great cardinal's stately
palace, toward a far more mighty and majestic palace beyond--Westminster.
Tom stared in glad wonder at the vast pile of masonry, the wide-spreading
wings, the frowning bastions and turrets, the huge stone gateway, with
its gilded bars and its magnificent array of colossal granite lions, and
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