have leisure for correspondence. I perfectly recollect your name as
that of an old schoolfellow, and distinctly remember your appearance and
dress as a boy, and believe you had a brother who was unfortunately
drowned in the Serpentine. If you had made yourself personally known to
me at the dinner, I should have been well pleased; though in that case I
should have lost your modest and manly letter. Faithfully yours, CHARLES
DICKENS."

[6] I take other fanciful allusions to the lady from two of his
occasional writings. The first from his visit to the city churches
(written during the Dombey time, when he had to select a church for the
marriage of Florence): "Its drowsy cadence soon lulls the three old
women asleep, and the unmarried tradesman sits looking out at window,
and the married tradesman sits looking at his wife's bonnet, and the
lovers sit looking at one another, so superlatively happy, that I mind
when I, turned of eighteen, went with my Angelica to a city church on
account of a shower (by this special coincidence that it was in Huggin
Lane), and when I said to my Angelica, 'Let the blessed event, Angelica,
occur at no altar but this!' and when my Angelica consented that it
should occur at no other--which it certainly never did, for it never
occurred anywhere. And O, Angelica, what has become of you, this present
Sunday morning when I can't attend to the sermon? and, more difficult
question than that, what has become of Me as I was when I sat by your
side?" The second, from his pleasant paper on birthdays: "I gave a party
on the occasion. She was there. It is unnecessary to name Her, more
particularly; She was older than I, and had pervaded every chink and
crevice of my mind for three or four years. I had held volumes of
Imaginary Conversations with her mother on the subject of our union, and
I had written letters more in number than Horace Walpole's, to that
discreet woman, soliciting her daughter's hand in marriage. I had never
had the remotest intention of sending any of those letters; but to write
them, and after a few days tear them up, had been a sublime occupation."

CHAPTER IV.

REPORTERS' GALLERY AND NEWSPAPER LITERATURE.

1831-1835.

Reporting for _True Sun_--First seen by
me--Reporting for _Mirror_ and
_Chronicle_--First Published Piece--Discipline
and Experiences of Reporting--Life as a
Reporter--John Black--Mr. Thomas Beard--A
Letter to hi