ng him, like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once.
Buckingham (Jingle) and Fenton (a capital rendering of the Fat Boy)
both please me; and in expanding the episode of the sausage and the
trouser-buttons M. D--' has shown delicacy and judgment by altering
the latter into diamond studs.

"Alas! madam, I wish the same could be said for his treatment of my
female puppets, which not only shocks but bewilders me. In her
earlier appearances Mrs. Bardell (Milady) is a fairly consistent
character; and why M. D--' should hazard that consistency by
identifying her with the middle-aged lady at the great White Horse,
Ipswich, passes my comprehension. I say, madam, that it bewilders
me; but for M. D--'s subsequent development of the occurrences at
that hostelry I entertain feelings of which mere astonishment is,
perhaps, the mildest. I can hardly bring myself to discuss this with
a lady; but you will allow me to protest in the very strongest terms
that Mr. Pickwick made that unfortunate mistake about the sleeping
apartment in the completest innocence, that in ejaculating 'ha-hum'
he merely uttered a note of warning, and that 'ha-hum' is _not_
(as M. D--' suspects) an English word from which certain syllables
have been discreetly removed; that in thrusting his head through the
bed-curtains he was, as I am careful to say, 'not actuated by any
definite object'; and that, as a gentleman should, he withdrew at the
earliest possible moment. His intercepted duel with Mr. Peter Magnus
(De Wardes) rests, as I fondly imagined I had made clear, upon a
complete misunderstanding. The whole business of the _fleur-de-lys_
on Mrs. Bardell's shoulder is a sheer interpolation and should be
expunged, not only on grounds of morality, but because when you reach
the actual trial, 'Bardell _v_. Pickwick,' you will find this
discovery of the defendant's impossible either to ignore or to
reconcile with the jury's verdict. Against the intervention of
Richelieu (Mr. Nupkins) I have nothing to urge. M. D--' opines that I
shall in the end deal out poetical justice to Mrs. Bardell as Milady.
He is right. I have, indeed, gone so far as to imprison her;
but I own that her execution (as suggested by him) at the hands of
the Queer Client, with Pickwick and his friends (or, alternatively,
Mrs.