nothing through powerful telescopes for hours, and,
when at last they saw a cloud of smoke, fancying a steamer behind it,
and going home comfortable and happy. I have found out that our next
neighbor has a wife and something else under the same roof with the rest
of his furniture,--the wife deaf and blind, and the something else given
to drinking. And if you ever get to the end of this letter _you_ will
find out that I subscribe myself on paper, as on everything else (some
atonement perhaps for its length and absurdity)," etc. etc.

In his next letter (from 12, High Street, Broadstairs, on the 7th) there
is allusion to one of the many piracies of _Pickwick_, which had
distinguished itself beyond the rest by a preface abusive of the writer
plundered: "I recollect this 'member of the Dramatic Authors' Society'
bringing an action once against Chapman who rented the City theatre, in
which it was proved that he had undertaken to write under special
agreement seven melodramas for five pounds, to enable him to do which a
room had been hired in a gin-shop close by. The defendant's plea was
that the plaintiff was always drunk, and had not fulfilled his contract.
Well, if the _Pickwick_ has been the means of putting a few shillings in
the vermin-eaten pockets of so miserable a creature, and has saved him
from a workhouse or a jail, let him empty out his little pot of filth
and welcome. I am quite content to have been the means of relieving him.
Besides, he seems to have suffered by agreements!"

His own troubles in that way were compromised for the time, as already
hinted, at the close of this September month; and at the end of the
month following, after finishing _Pickwick_ and resuming _Oliver_, the
latter having been suspended by him during the recent disputes, he made
his first visit to Brighton. The opening of his letter of Friday the 3d
of November is full of regrets that I had been unable to join them
there: "It is a beautiful day, and we have been taking advantage of it,
but the wind until to-day has been so high and the weather so stormy
that Kate has been scarcely able to peep out of doors. On Wednesday it
blew a perfect hurricane, breaking windows, knocking down shutters,
carrying people off their legs, blowing the fires out, and causing
universal consternation. The air was for some hours darkened with a
shower of black hats (second-hand), which are supposed to have been
blown off the heads of unwary passengers in remo