ome length commented. There, in the
midst of the dying horrors of that storm--there, on those familiar
sands, where Mas'r Davy and Little Em'ly had so often looked for shells
when they were children, on the very spot where some lighter fragments
of the old boat, blown down the night before, had been scattered by the
tempest, David Copperfield was heard describing, in the last mournful
sentence of the Reading, how he saw _him_ lying with his curly head upon
his arm, as he had often seen him lie when they were at school together.

THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH.

A Fairy Tale of Home was here related, that in its graceful and
fantastic freaks of fancy might have been imagined by the Danish poet,
Hans Christian Andersen. In its combination of simple pathos and genial
drollery, however, it was a story that no other could by possibility
have told than the great English Humorist. If there was something really
akin to the genius of Andersen, in the notion of the Cricket with its
shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounding through the house, and seeming
to twinkle in the outer darkness like a star, Dickens, and no other
could, by any chance, have conjured up the forms of either Caleb
Plummer, or Gruff-and-Tackleton. The cuckoo on the Dutch clock, now like
a spectral voice, now hiccoughing on the assembled company, as if he
had got drunk for joy; the little haymaker over the dial mowing down
imaginary grass, jerking right and left with his scythe in front of a
Moorish palace; the hideous, hairy, red-eyed jacks-in-boxes; the flies
in the Noah's arks, that "an't on that scale neither as compared with
elephants;" the giant masks, having a certain furtive leer, "safe to
destroy the peace of mind of any young gentlemen between the ages of six
and eleven, for the whole Christmas or Midsummer vacation," were all of
them like dreams of the Danish poet, coloured into a semblance of life
by the grotesque humour of the English Novelist. But dear little Dot,
who was rather of the dumpling's shape--"but I don't myself object to
that"--and good, lumbering John Peerybingle, her husband, often so near
to something or another very clever, according to his own account, and
Boxer, the carrier's dog, "with that preposterous nothing of a fag-end
of a tail of his, describing circles of barks round the horse, making
savage rushes at his mistress, and facetiously bringing himself to
sudden stops,"--all bear upon them unmistakably the sign-manual of Boz.