would like to purchase my Clavis you shall have
it at a very ~reduced price~ Cheaper in
comparison than a Leg.

Yours &c
~C Dickens.~

PS. I suppose all this time you have had ~a
wooden~ leg. I have weighed yours every saturday
Night

(No date, but was written in latter part of 1825.)]

The offense of Tobin went no deeper than the having at last worn out
even Dickens's patience and kindness. His applications for relief were
so incessantly repeated, that to cut him and them adrift altogether was
the only way of escape from what had become an intolerable nuisance. To
Mr. Thomas's letter the reader will thank me for adding one not less
interesting with which Dr. Henry Danson has favored me. We have here,
with the same fun and animal spirits, a little of the proneness to
mischief which his other schoolfellow says he was free from; but the
mischief is all of the harmless kind, and might perhaps have been better
described as but part of an irrepressible vivacity:

"My impression is that I was a schoolfellow of Dickens for nearly two
years: he left before me, I think at about fifteen years of age. Mr.
Jones's school, called the Wellington Academy, was in the Hampstead
Road, at the northeast corner of Granby Street. The school-house was
afterwards removed for the London and Northwestern Railway. It was
considered at the time a very superior sort of school,--one of the best,
indeed, in that part of London; but it was most shamefully mismanaged,
and the boys made but very little progress. The proprietor, Mr. Jones,
was a Welshman; a most ignorant fellow, and a mere tyrant; whose chief
employment was to scourge the boys. Dickens has given a very lively
account of this place in his paper entitled Our School, but it is very
mythical in many respects, and more especially in the compliment he pays
in it to himself. I do not remember that Dickens distinguished himself
in any way, or carried off any prizes. My belief is that he did not
learn Greek or Latin there; and you will remember there is no allusion
to the classics in any of his writings. He was a handsome, curly-headed
lad, full of animation and animal spirits, and probably was connected
with every mischievous prank in the school. I do not think he came in
for any of Mr. Jones's scourging propensity: in fact, together with
myself, he was only a day-pupil,