gs, _Barnaby_ was placed upon the
footing desired, and was to begin when _Oliver_ closed.

Of the progress of his _Oliver_, and his habits of writing at the time,
it may perhaps be worth giving some additional glimpses from his letters
of 1838. "I was thinking about _Oliver_ till dinner-time yesterday," he
wrote on the 9th of March,[15] "and, just as I had fallen upon him tooth
and nail, was called away to sit with Kate. I did eight slips, however,
and hope to make them fifteen this morning." Three days before, a little
daughter had been born to him, who became a little god-daughter to me;
on which occasion (having closed his announcement with a postscript of
"I can do nothing this morning. What time will you ride? The sooner the
better, for a good long spell"), we rode out fifteen miles on the great
north road, and, after dining at the Red Lion in Barnet on our way home,
distinguished the already memorable day by bringing in both hacks dead
lame.

On that day week, Monday, the 13th, after describing himself "sitting
patiently at home waiting for _Oliver Twist_ who has not yet arrived,"
which was his pleasant form of saying that his fancy had fallen into
sluggishness that morning, he made addition not less pleasant as to some
piece of painful news I had sent him, now forgotten: "I have not yet
seen the paper, and you throw me into a fever. The comfort is, that all
the strange and terrible things come uppermost, and that the good and
pleasant things are mixed up with every moment of our existence so
plentifully that we scarcely heed them." At the close of the month Mrs.
Dickens was well enough to accompany him to Richmond, for now the time
was come to start _Nickleby_; and, having been away from town when
_Pickwick's_ first number came out, he made it a superstition to be
absent at all future similar times. The magazine-day of that April
month, I remember, fell upon a Saturday, and the previous evening had
brought me a peremptory summons: "Meet me at the Shakspeare on Saturday
night at eight; order your horse at midnight, and ride back with me."
Which was done accordingly. The smallest hour was sounding from St.
Paul's into the night before we started, and the night was none of the
pleasantest; but we carried news that lightened every part of the road,
for the sale of _Nickleby_ had reached that day the astonishing number
of nearly fifty thousand! I left him working with unusual cheerfulness
at _Oliver Twist_ when I lef