stly
apparitions, is eventually extricated from the melancholy plight
in which he finds himself saturated and isolated in the middle of a
spiderous web of railroads.

His extricator is--Lamps! A worthy companion portrait to that of
cinderous Mr. Toodles, the stoker, familiar to the readers of Dombey.
Characters, those two, quite as typical, after their fashion, of the
later railway period of Dickens, as even Sam Weller, the boots, and Old
Weller, the coachman, were of his earlier coaching period in the days of
Pickwick. To see him, in his capacity as Lamps, when excited, take what
he called "a rounder"--that is to say, giving himself, with his oily
handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, "an elaborate smear from
behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the forehead, and down the
other cheek, behind his left ear," after which operation he is described
as having shone exceedingly--was to be with him, again, at once, in his
greasy little cabin, which was suggestive to the sense of smell of a
cabin in a whaler. How it came to pass that Lamps sang comic songs,
of his own composition, to his bed-ridden daughter Phoebe, by way of
enlivening her solitude, and how Phoebe, while manipulating the threads
on her lace-pillow, as though she were playing a musical instrument,
taught her little band of children to chant to a pleasant tune the
multiplication-table, and so fix it and other useful knowledge indelibly
upon the tablets of their memory, the Author-Reader would then relate,
as no other Reader, however gifted, who was not also the Author, would
have been allowed to do, supposing this latter had had the hardihood to
attempt the relation.

As the Reading advanced, the difficulties not only increased, they
became tenfold, immediately upon the introduction of Polly. Dickens,
however, conquered them all somehow. But to anybody else, setting forth
the story histrionically, impersonating the characters as they appeared,
these difficulties would by necessity have been insuperable or simply
overwhelming. Catching the very little fair-haired girl's Christian
name readily enough, when she comes up to him in the street, with the
surprising announcement, "O! if you please, I am lost!" Barbox Brothers
can't for the life of him conjecture what her surname is,--carefully
imitating, though he does, the sound that comes from the childish lips,
each time on its repetition. Hazarding "Trivits," first of all,
then "Paddens," then "Tappi-