g being about equal in difficulty to the mastery of
six languages." Undaunted, he plunged into it, self-teaching in this as
in graver things, and, having bought Mr. Gurney's half-guinea book,
worked steadily his way through its distractions. "The changes that were
rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such
another position something else entirely different; the wonderful
vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences
that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a
curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but
reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly,
through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, there then
appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the
most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance,
that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant expectation, and that
a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed
these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else
out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking
them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system: in short, it was
almost heart-breaking."

What it was that made it not quite heart-breaking to the hero of the
fiction, its readers know; and something of the same kind was now to
enter into the actual experience of its writer. First let me say,
however, that after subduing to his wants in marvelously quick time this
unruly and unaccommodating servant of stenography, what he most desired
was still not open to him. "There never _was_ such a short-hand writer,"
has been often said to me by Mr. Beard, the friend he first made in that
line when he entered the gallery, and with whom to the close of his life
he maintained the friendliest intercourse. But there was no opening for
him in the gallery yet. He had to pass nearly two years as a reporter
for one of the offices in Doctors' Commons, practicing in this and the
other law courts, before he became a sharer in parliamentary toils and
triumphs; and what sustained his young hero through something of the
same sort of trial was also his own support. He too had his Dora, at
apparently the same hopeless elevation; striven for as the one only
thing to be attained, and even more unattainable, for neither did he
succeed nor happily did she die; but the one idol, like the other,
su