the
matter of Mr. Cheese, I found she was Mrs. Cheese. And I expatiated to
the member for Marylebone, Lord Fermoy, generally conceiving him to be
an Irish member, on the contemptible character of the Marylebone
constituency and Marylebone representation."

Among his good things should not be omitted his telling of a ghost
story. He had something of a hankering after them, as the readers of his
briefer pieces will know; and such was his interest generally in things
supernatural that, but for the strong restraining power of his common
sense, he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism. As it was,
the fanciful side of his nature stopped short at such pardonable
superstitions as those of dreams, and lucky days, or other marvels of
natural coincidence; and no man was readier to apply sharp tests to a
ghost story or a haunted house, though there was just so much tendency
to believe in any such, "well-authenticated," as made perfect his manner
of telling one. Such a story is related in the 125th number of _All the
Year Round_, which before its publication both Mr. Layard and myself saw
at Gadshill, and identified as one related by Lord Lytton. It was
published in September, and in a day or two led to what Dickens will
relate. "The artist himself who is the hero of that story" (to Lord
Lytton, 15th of September 1861) "has sent me in black and white his own
account of the whole experience, so very original, so very
extraordinary, so very far beyond the version I have published, that all
other like stories turn pale before it." The ghost thus reinforced came
out in the number published on the 5th of October; and the reader who
cares to turn to it, and compare what Dickens in the interval (17th of
September) wrote to myself, will have some measure of his readiness to
believe in such things. "Upon the publication of the ghost story, up has
started the portrait-painter who saw the phantoms! His own written story
is out of all distance the most extraordinary that ever was produced;
and is as far beyond my version or Bulwer's, as Scott is beyond James.
Everything connected with it is amazing; but conceive this--the
portrait-painter had been engaged to write it elsewhere as a story for
next Christmas, and not unnaturally supposed, when he saw himself
anticipated in _All the Year Round_, that there had been treachery at
his printer's. 'In particular,' says he, 'how else was it possible that
the date, the 13th of September, cou