eing eight or nine years old?--In that case I should probably not kill
him until the fifth number. Do you think the people so likely to be
pleased with Florence, and Walter, as to relish another number of them
at their present age? Otherwise, Walter will be two or three and twenty,
straightway. I wish you would think of this. . . . I am sure you are right
about the christening. It shall be artfully and easily amended. . . . Eh?"

Meanwhile, two days before this letter, his first number had been
launched with a sale that transcended his hopes and brought back
_Nickleby_ days. The _Dombey_ success "is BRILLIANT!" he wrote to me on
the 11th. "I had put before me thirty thousand as the limit of the most
extreme success, saying that if we should reach that, I should be more
than satisfied and more than happy; you will judge how happy I am! I
read the second number here last night to the most prodigious and
uproarious delight of the circle. I never saw or heard people laugh so.
You will allow me to observe that my reading of the Major has merit."
What a valley of the shadow he had just been passing, in his journey
through his Christmas book, has before been told; but always, and with
only too much eagerness, he sprang up under pressure. "A week of perfect
idleness," he wrote to me on the 26th, "has brought me round
again--idleness so rusting and devouring, so complete and unbroken, that
I am quite glad to write the heading of the first chapter of number
three to-day. I shall be slow at first, I fear, in consequence of that
change of the plan. But I allow myself nearly three weeks for the
number; designing, at present, to start for Paris on the 16th of
November. Full particulars in future bills. Just going to bed. I think I
can make a good effect, on the after story, of the feeling created by
the additional number before Paul's death." . . . Five more days confirmed
him in this hope. "I am at work at _Dombey_ with good speed, thank God.
All well here. Country stupendously beautiful. Mountains covered with
snow. Rich, crisp weather." There was one drawback. The second number
had gone out to him, and the illustrations he found to be so "dreadfully
bad" that they made him "curl his legs up." They made him also more than
usually anxious in regard to a special illustration on which he set much
store, for the part he had in hand.

The first chapter of it was sent me only four days later (nearly half
the entire part, so freely his fa