the P----West Britons into one
Patrick, etc., what a saving of time it would be!

"I got along pretty well with my first few stories. I had some
characters around me which, a little disguised, answered well enough.
There was the minister of the parish, and there was an old schoolmaster
either of them served very satisfactorily for grandfathers and old
uncles. All I had to do was to shift some of their leading
peculiarities, keeping the rest. The old minister wore knee-breeches. I
clapped them on to the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster carried a tall
gold-headed cane. I put this in the minister's hands. So with other
things,--I shifted them round, and got a set of characters who, taken
together, reproduced the chief persons of the village where I lived, but
did not copy any individual exactly. Thus it went on for a while; but by
and by my stock company began to be rather too familiarly known, in spite
of their change of costume, and at last some altogether too sagacious
person published what he called a 'key' to several of my earlier stories,
in which I found the names of a number of neighbors attached to aliases
of my own invention. All the 'types,' as he called them, represented by
these personages of my story had come to be recognized, each as standing
for one and the same individual of my acquaintance. It had been of no
use to change the costume. Even changing the sex did no good. I had a
famous old gossip in one of my tales,--a much-babbling Widow Sertingly.
'Sho!' they all said, that 's old Deacon Spinner, the same he told about
in that other story of his,--only the deacon's got on a petticoat and a
mob-cap,--but it's the same old sixpence.' So I said to myself, I must
have some new characters. I had no trouble with young characters; they
are all pretty much alike,--dark-haired or light-haired, with the outfits
belonging to their complexion, respectively. I had an old great-aunt,
who was a tip-top eccentric. I had never seen anything just like her in
books. So I said, I will have you, old lady, in one of my stories; and,
sure enough, I fitted her out with a first-rate odd-sounding name, which
I got from the directory, and sent her forth to the world, disguised, as
I supposed, beyond the possibility of recognition. The book sold well,
and the eccentric personage was voted a novelty. A few weeks after it
was published a lawyer called upon me, as the agent of the person in the
directory, whose family name I had used, as