riots Conjointly.'

If you can figure to yourself the choice absurdity of receiving anything
into one's mind in this way, you can imagine the labour I underwent in
my attempts to keep the lower part of my face square, and to lift up one
eye gently, as with admiring attention. But I am bound to add that this
is really pretty literal; for I read them afterwards."

This, too, was the year of other uncomfortable glories of France in the
last three years of her Orleans dynasty; among them the Tahiti business,
as politicians may remember; and so hot became rumours of war with
England at the opening of September that Dickens had serious thoughts of
at once striking his tent. One of his letters was filled with the
conflicting doubts in which they lived for nigh a fortnight, every day's
arrival contradicting the arrival of the day before: so that, as he told
me, you met a man in the street to-day, who told you there would
certainly be war in a week; and you met the same man in the street
to-morrow, and he swore he always knew there would be nothing but peace;
and you met him again the day after, and he said it all depended _now_
on something perfectly new and unheard of before, which somebody else
said had just come to the knowledge of some consul in some dispatch
which said something about some telegraph which had been at work
somewhere, signalizing some prodigious intelligence. However, it all
passed harmlessly away, leaving him undisturbed opportunity to avail
himself of a pleasure that arose out of the consul-general's dinner
party, and to be present at a great reception given shortly after by the
good "old Blunderbore" just mentioned, on the occasion of his daughter's
birthday.

The Marquis had a splendid house, but Dickens found the grounds so
carved into grottoes and fanciful walks as to remind him of nothing so
much as our old White-conduit-house, except that he would have been well
pleased, on the present occasion, to have discovered a waiter crying,
"Give your orders, gents!" it being not easy to him at any time to keep
up, the whole night through, on ices and variegated lamps merely. But
the scene for awhile was amusing enough, and not rendered less so by the
delight of the Marquis himself, "who was constantly diving out into dark
corners and then among the lattice-work and flower pots, rubbing his
hands and going round and round with explosive chuckles in his huge
satisfaction with the entertainment." With ho