of
gin-and-water, warm, when I rings the bell a second time; for that is
always my allowange, and I never takes a drop beyond. In case there
should be sich a thing as a cowcumber in the 'ouse, I'm rather partial
to 'em, though I am but a poor woman." Winding all up,--with one of
those amazing confusions of a Scriptural recollection which prompts
her at another time in the novel to exclaim, in regard to the Ankworks
package, "'I wish it was in Jonadge's belly, I do,' appearing to confound
the prophet with the whale in that mysterious aspiration,"--by observing
at this point, "Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain't so easy for
'em to see out of a needle's eye. That is my comfort, and I hope I knows
it." One whole chapter of "Martin Chuzzlewit," with the exception of the
merest fragment of it--_the_ chapter pre-eminently in relation to Mrs.
Gamp--we always regretted as having been either overlooked or purposely
set aside in the compilation both of the earlier and the later version
of this Reading, the chapter, that is, in which Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Prig
converse together in the former's sleeping apartment.

The mere description of the interior of that chamber, related by the
Author's lips, would have been so irresistibly ridiculous--the tent
bedstead ornamented with pippins carved in timber, that tumbled down
on the slightest provocation like a wooden shower-bath--the chest of
drawers, from which the handles had long been pulled off, so that its
contents could only be got at either by tilting the whole structure
until all the drawers fell out together, or by opening each of them
singly with knives like oysters--the miscellaneous salad bought for
twopence by Betsey Prig on condition that the vendor could get it all
into her pocket (including among other items a green vegetable of an
expansive nature, of such magnificent proportions that before it could
be got either in or out it had to be shut up like an umbrella), which
was happily accomplished in High Holborn, to the breathless interest of
a hackney-coach stand.

One inestimable portion, however, of this memorable occasion of
festivity between those frequend pardners, Betsey Prig and Sairey Gamp,
was, by a most ingenious dovetailing together of two disjointed parts,
incorporated with the adroitly compacted materials of a Reading that
was as brief as the laughter provoked by it was boisterous and
inextinguishable. As to the manner of the dovetailing, it will be
readi