the same
design on Maclise's part there was another reading, this time at my
house, and of the number shadowed forth by what had been read at
Hampstead. "I will bring the MS.," he writes on the 12th of November,
"and, for Mac's information if needful, the number before it. I have
only this moment put the finishing touch to it. The difficulty has been
tremendous--the anguish unspeakable. I didn't say six. Therefore dine at
half-past five like a Christian. I shall bring Mac at that hour."

He had sent me, shortly before, the chapters in which the Marchioness
nurses Dick in his fever, and puts his favorite philosophy to the hard
test of asking him whether he has ever put pieces of orange-peel into
cold water and made believe it was wine. "If you make believe very much,
it's quite nice; but if you don't, you know, it hasn't much flavor:" so
it stood originally, and to the latter word in the little creature's
mouth I seem to have objected. Replying (on the 16th of December) he
writes, "'If you make believe very much, it's quite nice; but if you
don't, you know, it seems as if it would bear a little more seasoning,
certainly.' I think that's better. Flavor is a common word in cookery,
and among cooks, and so I used it. The part you cut out in the other
number, which was sent me this morning, I had put in with a view to
Quilp's last appearance on any stage, which is casting its shadow upon
my mind; but it will come well enough without such a preparation, so I
made no change. I mean to shirk Sir Robert Inglis, and work to-night. I
have been solemnly revolving the general story all this morning. The
forty-fifth number will certainly close. Perhaps this forty-first, which
I am now at work on, had better contain the announcement of _Barnaby_? I
am glad you like Dick and the Marchioness in that sixty-fourth chapter.
I thought you would."

Fast shortening as the life of little Nell was now, the dying year might
have seen it pass away; but I never knew him wind up any tale with such
a sorrowful reluctance as this. He caught at any excuse to hold his hand
from it, and stretched to the utmost limit the time left to complete it
in. Christmas interposed its delays too, so that Twelfth-night had come
and gone when I wrote to him in the belief that he was nearly done.
"Done!" he wrote back to me on Friday, the 7th; "Done!!! Why, bless you,
I shall not be done till Wednesday night. I only began yesterday, and
this part of the story is not