er, "When I saw Dr. Gode begin to tell his puddings
hanging in the chimney, I told him he would not live long!"

I wish I had copied that passage from "The Table Talk" in large round
hand, and set it before my father at breakfast, the morn preceding that
fatal eve in which Uncle Jack persuaded him to tell his puddings.

Yet, now I think of it, Uncle Jack hung the puddings in the chimney, but
he did not persuade my father to tell them.

Beyond a vague surmise that half the suspended "tomacula" would furnish
a breakfast to Uncle Jack, and that the youthful appetite of Pisistratus
would despatch the rest, my father did not give a thought to the
nutritious properties of the puddings,--in other words, to the two
thousand pounds which, thanks to Mr. Tibbets, dangled down the chimney.
So far as the Great Work was concerned, my father only cared for its
publication, not its profits. I will not say that he might not hunger
for praise, but I am quite sure that he did not care a button for
pudding. Nevertheless, it was an infaust and sinister augury for Austin
Caxton, the very appearance, the very suspension and danglement of any
puddings whatsoever, right over his ingle-nook, when those puddings were
made by the sleek hands of Uncle Jack! None of the puddings which he,
poor man, had all his life been stringing, whether from his own
chimneys or the chimneys of other people, had turned out to be real
puddings,--they had always been the eidola, the erscheinungen, the
phantoms and semblances of puddings.

I question if Uncle Jack knew much about Democritus of Abdera. But he
was certainly tainted with the philosophy of that fanciful sage. He
peopled the air with images of colossal stature which impressed all
his dreams and divinations, and from whose influences came his very
sensations and thoughts. His whole being, asleep or waking, was thus but
the reflection of great phantom puddings!

As soon as Mr. Tibbets had possessed himself of the two volumes of the
"History of Human Error," he had necessarily established that hold upon
my father which hitherto those lubricate hands of his had failed to
effect. He had found what he had so long sighed for in vain,--his point
d'appui, wherein to fix the Archimedean screw. He fixed it tight in the
"History of Human Error," and moved the Caxtonian world.

A day or two after the conversation recorded in my last chapter, I saw
Uncle Jack coming out of the mahogany doors of my father's banker;