worse than any of 'em!"--the hearers paid to the Reader
of Bob Sawyer's Party their last tribute of laughter.

THE CHIMES.

As poetical in its conception, and also, intermittently, in its
treatment, as anything he ever wrote, this Goblin Story of Some Bells
that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, was, in those purely
goblin, or more intensely imaginative portions of it, one of the most
effective of our Author's Readings. Hence its selection by him for his
very first Reading on his own account in St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre.
Listening, as we did, then and afterwards, to the tale, as it was told
by his own sympathetic lips, much of the incongruity, otherwise no
doubt apparent in the narrative, seemed at those times to disappear
altogether. The incongruity, we mean, observable between the queer
little ticket-porter and the elfin phantoms of the belfry; between
Trotty Veck, in his "breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed,
stony-toed, tooth-chattering" stand-point by the old church-door, and
the Goblin Sight beheld by him when he had clambered up, up, up among
the roof-beams of the great church-tower. As the story was related in
its original form, it was rung out befittingly from the Chimes in four
quarters. As a Reading it was subdivided simply into three parts.

Nothing whatever was preserved (by an error as it always seemed to
us) of the admirable introduction. The story-teller piqued no one into
attention by saying--to begin with--"There are not many people who
would care to sleep in a church." Adding immediately, with delightful
particularity, "I don't mean at sermon time in warm weather (when the
thing has actually been done once or twice), but in the night, and
alone." Not a word was uttered in the exordium of the Reading about
the dismal trick the night-wind has in those ghostly hours of wandering
round and round a building of that sort, and moaning as it goes; of its
trying with a secret hand the windows and the doors, fumbling for some
crevice by which to enter, and, having got in, "as one not finding what
it seeks, whatever that may be," of its wailing and howling to issue
forth again; of its stalking through the aisles and gliding round and
round the pillars, and "tempting the deep organ;" of its soaring up to
the roof, and after striving vainly to rend the rafters, flinging itself
despairingly upon the stones below, and passing mutteringly into the
vaults! Anon, coming up stealthily--the Chris