en the old ladies were quite
staggered by the impudence of the demand, Dickens would explode with
laughter and take to his heels.

"I met him one Sunday morning shortly after he left the school, and we
very piously attended the morning service at Seymour Street Chapel. I am
sorry to say Master Dickens did not attend in the slightest degree to
the service, but incited me to laughter by declaring his dinner was
ready and the potatoes would be spoiled, and in fact behaved in such a
manner that it was lucky for us we were not ejected from the chapel.

"I heard of him some time after from Tobin, whom I met carrying a
foaming pot of London particular in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and I then
understood that Dickens was in the same or some neighboring office.

"Many years elapsed after this before I became aware, from accidentally
reading Our School, that the brilliant and now famous Dickens was my old
schoolfellow. I didn't like to intrude myself upon him; and it was not
until three or four years ago, when he presided at the University
College dinner at Willis's rooms, and made a most brilliant and
effective speech, that I sent him a congratulatory note reminding him of
our former fellowship. To this he sent me a kind note in reply, and
which I value very much. I send you copies of these."[5]

From Dickens himself I never heard much allusion to the school thus
described; but I knew that, besides being the subject dealt with in
_Household Words_, it had supplied some of the lighter traits of Salem
House for _Copperfield_; and that to the fact of one of its tutors being
afterwards engaged to teach a boy of Macready's, our common friend,
Dickens used to point for one of the illustrations of his favorite
theory as to the smallness of the world, and how things and persons
apparently the most unlikely to meet were continually knocking up
against each other. The employment as his amanuensis of his schoolfellow
Tobin dates as early as his Doctors'-Commons days, but both my
correspondents are mistaken in the impression they appear to have
received that Tobin had been previously his fellow-clerk in the same
attorney's office. I had thought him more likely to have been
accompanied there by another of his boyish acquaintances who became
afterwards a solicitor, Mr. Mitton, not recollected by either of my
correspondents in connection with the school, but whom I frequently met
with him in later years, and for whom he had the regard arising out