tells in proof of a propensity to bad
company in more refined members of the feathered race, I am myself in a
position to vouch. Walking by a dirty court in Spitalfields one day, the
quick little busy intelligence of a goldfinch, drawing water for himself
in his cage, so attracted him that he bought the bird, which had other
accomplishments; but not one of them would the little creature show off
in his new abode in Doughty-street, and he drew no water but by stealth
or under the cloak of night. "After an interval of futile and at length
hopeless expectation, the merchant who had educated him was appealed to.
The merchant was a bow-legged character, with a flat and cushiony nose,
like the last new strawberry. He wore a fur cap, and shorts, and was of
the velveteen race, velveteeny. He sent word that he would 'look round.'
He looked round, appeared in the doorway of the room, and slightly
cocked up his evil eye at the goldfinch. Instantly a raging thirst beset
that bird; and when it was appeased, he still drew several unnecessary
buckets of water, leaping about his perch and sharpening his bill with
irrepressible satisfaction."

The Uncommercial Traveller papers, his two serial stories, and his
Christmas tales, were all the contributions of any importance made by
Dickens to _All the Year Round_; but he reprinted in it, on the
completion of his first story, a short tale called "Hunted Down,"
written for a newspaper in America called the _New York Ledger_. Its
subject had been taken from the life of a notorious criminal already
named, and its principal claim to notice was the price paid for it. For
a story not longer than half of one of the numbers of _Chuzzlewit_ or
_Copperfield_, he had received a thousand pounds.[240] It was one of the
indications of the eager desire which his entry on the career of a
public reader had aroused in America to induce him again to visit that
continent; and at the very time he had this magnificent offer from the
New York journal, Mr. Fields of Boston, who was then on a visit to
Europe, was pressing him so much to go that his resolution was almost
shaken. "I am now," he wrote to me from Gadshill on the 9th of July
1859, "getting the _Tale of Two Cities_ into that state that IF I should
decide to go to America late in September, I could turn to, at any time,
and write on with great vigour. Mr. Fields has been down here for a day,
and with the strongest intensity urges that there is no drawback,