it is susceptible, I have not the
smallest doubt. . . . But you shall determine. What do you think? And what
do you say? The chances are, that it will either strike you instantly,
or not strike you at all. Which is it, my dear fellow? You know I am not
bigoted to the first suggestions of my own fancy; but you know also
exactly how I should use such a lever, and how much power I should find
in it. Which is it? What do you say?--I have not myself said half
enough. Indeed I have said next to nothing; but like the parrot in the
negro-story, I 'think a dam deal.'"

My objection, incident more or less to every such scheme, was the risk
of losing its general advantage by making it too specially dependent on
individual characteristics; but there was much in favour of the present
notion, and its plan had been modified so far, in the discussions that
followed, as to involve less absolute personal identification with
Dickens,--when discussion, project, everything was swept away by a
larger scheme, in its extent and its danger more suitable to the wild
and hazardous enterprises of that prodigious year (1845) of excitement
and disaster. In this more tremendous adventure, already hinted at on a
previous page, we all became involved; and the chirp of the Cricket,
delayed in consequence until Christmas, was heard then in circumstances
quite other than those that were first intended. The change he thus
announced to me about half way through the summer, in the same letter
which told me the success of d'Orsay's kind exertion to procure a fresh
engagement for his courier Roche.[106] "What do you think of a notion
that has occurred to me in connection with our abandoned little weekly?
It would be a delicate and beautiful fancy for a Christmas book, making
the Cricket a little household god--silent in the wrong and sorrow of
the tale, and loud again when all went well and happy." The reader will
not need to be told that thus originated the story of the _Cricket on
the Hearth_, a Fairy Tale of Home, which had a great popularity in the
Christmas days of 1845. Its sale at the outset doubled that of both its
predecessors.

But as yet the larger adventure has not made itself known, and the
interval was occupied with the private play of which the notion had been
started between us at his visit in December, and which cannot now be
better introduced than by a passage of autobiography. This belongs to
his early life, but I overlooked it when engaged