'_Holloa, old girl!_' (his
favourite expression), and died."

[Illustration:

3 Hanover Terrace
Friday Tenth May, 1861.

Mr. Lillie

Please make the alteration in the two windows in Wellington Street,
agreeably to the estimate you have sent me, and to have the work
completed with all convenient speed. Be so good as to be careful that
the bottom sashes are capable of being easily raised and the top sashes
of being easily let down----

Faithfully yours
Charles Dickens]

In an interesting letter addressed to Mr. Angus Fletcher, recently in
the possession of Mr. Arthur Hailstone of Manchester, Dickens further
describes the event:--"Suspectful of a butcher who had been heard to
threaten, I had the body opened. There were no traces of poison, and it
appeared he died of influenza. He has left considerable property,
chiefly in cheese and halfpence, buried in different parts of the
garden. The new raven (I have a new one, but he is comparatively of weak
intellect) administered to his effects, and turns up something every
day. The last piece of _bijouterie_ was a hammer of considerable size,
supposed to have been stolen from a vindictive carpenter, who had been
heard to speak darkly of vengeance down the mews."

Maclise on hearing the news sent to Forster a letter, and a pen-and-ink
sketch, being the famous "Apotheosis." The second raven died in 1845,
probably from "having indulged the same illicit taste for putty and
paint, which had been fatal to his predecessor." Dickens says:--

"Voracity killed him, as it did Scott's; he died
unexpectedly by the kitchen fire. He kept his eye
to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and
suddenly turned over on his back with a sepulchral
cry of '_Cuckoo!_'"

These ravens were of course the two "great originals" of which Grip in
_Barnaby Rudge_ was the "compound." There was a third raven at Gad's
Hill, but he "gave no evidence of ever cultivating his mind." The
novelist's remarkable partiality for ravens called forth at the time the
preposterous rumour that "Dickens had gone raving (raven) mad."

Here Longfellow visited Dickens in 1841, and thus referred to his
visit:--"I write this from Dickens's study, the focus from which so many
luminous things have radiated. The raven croaks in the garden,