ng
time: but a more sordid mass of eavesdroppings, kitchen-ashes and
floor-sweepings, collected and interchanged by a pair of treacherous
Flunkies (big bullying Flunky and little trembling cringing one, Grumkow
and Reichenbach), was never got together out of a gentleman's household.
To no idlest reader, armed even with barnacles, and holding mouth and
nose, can the stirring-up of such a dust-bin be long tolerable. But
the amazing problem was this Editor's, doomed to spell the Event into
clearness if he could, and put dates, physiognomy and outline to it, by
help of such Flunky-Sanscrit!--That Nosti-Grumkow Correspondence, as we
now have it in the Paper-Office,--interpretable only by acres of British
Despatches, by incondite dateless helpless Prussian Books ("printed
Blotches of Human Stupor," as Smelfungus calls them): how gladly would
one return them all to St. Mary Axe, there to lie through Eternity! It
is like holding dialogue with a rookery; asking your way (perhaps in
flight for life, as was partly my own case) by colloquy with successive
or even simultaneous Rookeries. Reader, have you tried such a thing? An
adventure, never to be spoken of again, when once DONE!

Wilhelmina pretends to give quotations [Wilhelmina, i. 233-235.] from
this subterranean Grumkow-Reichenbach Correspondence; but hers are only
extracts from some description or remembrance; hardly one word is close
to the original, though here and there some outline or shadow of a real
passage is traceable. What fractional elements, capable of gaining some
vestige of meaning when laid together in their cosmic order, I could
pick from the circumambient immensity not cosmic, are here for the
reader's behoof. Let him skip, if, like myself, he is weary; for
the substance of the story is elsewhere given. Or perhaps he has the
curiosity to know the speech of birds? With abridgment, by occasional
change of phrase, above all by immense omission,--here, in specimen, is
something like what the Rookery says to poor Friedrich Wilhelm and us,
through St. Mary Axe and the Copyists in the Foreign Office! Friedrich
Wilhelm reads it (Hotham gives him reading of it) some weeks hence; we
not till generations afterwards. I abridge to the utmost;--will mark
in single commas what is not Abridgment but exact Translation;--with
rigorous attention to dates, and my best fidelity to any meaning there
may be:--

TO NOSTI (the so-called Excellenz Reichenbach) IN LONDON:

Gumkow