rtant adjuncts thereto, a courier
and a carriage. As to the latter it occurred to him that he might
perhaps get for little money "some good old shabby devil of a coach--one
of those vast phantoms that hide themselves in a corner of the
Pantechnicon;" and exactly such a one he found there; sitting himself
inside it, a perfect Sentimental Traveller, while the managing man told
him its history. "As for comfort--let me see--it is about the size of
your library; with night-lamps and day-lamps and pockets and imperials
and leathern cellars, and the most extraordinary contrivances. Joking
apart, it is a wonderful machine. And when you see it (if you _do_ see
it) you will roar at it first, and will then proclaim it to be
'perfectly brilliant, my dear fellow.'" It was marked sixty pounds; he
got it for five-and-forty; and my own emotions respecting it he had
described by anticipation quite correctly. In finding a courier he was
even more fortunate; and these successes were followed by a third
apparently very promising, but in the result less satisfactory. His
house was let to not very careful people.

The tenant having offered herself for Devonshire-terrace unexpectedly,
during the last week or two of his stay in England he went into
temporary quarters in Osnaburgh-terrace; and here a domestic difficulty
befell of which the mention may be amusing, when I have disposed of an
incident that preceded it too characteristic for omission. The Mendicity
Society's officers had caught a notorious begging-letter writer, had
identified him as an old offender against Dickens of which proofs were
found on his person, and had put matters in train for his proper
punishment; when the wretched creature's wife made such appeal before
the case was heard at the police-court, that Dickens broke down in his
character of prosecutor, and at the last moment, finding what was said
of the man's distress at the time to be true, relented. "When the
Mendicity officers themselves told me the man was in distress, I desired
them to suppress what they knew about him, and slipped out of the bundle
(in the police office) his first letter, which was the greatest lie of
all. For he looked wretched, and his wife had been waiting about the
street to see me, all the morning. It was an exceedingly bad case
however, and the imposition, all through, very great indeed. Insomuch
that I could not _say_ anything in his favour, even when I saw him. Yet
I was not sorry that the