tremely clever.

In Bayham Street, meanwhile, affairs were going on badly; the poor boy's
visits to his uncle, while the latter was still kept a prisoner by his
accident, were interrupted by another attack of fever; and on his
recovery the mysterious "deed" had again come uppermost. His father's
resources were so low, and all his expedients so thoroughly exhausted,
that trial was to be made whether his mother might not come to the
rescue. The time was arrived for her to exert herself, she said; and she
"must do something." The godfather down at Limehouse was reported to
have an Indian connection. People in the East Indies always sent their
children home to be educated. She would set up a school. They would all
grow rich by it. And then, thought the sick boy, "perhaps even I might
go to school myself."

A house was soon found at number four, Gower Street north; a large brass
plate on the door announced MRS. DICKENS'S ESTABLISHMENT; and the result
I can give in the exact words of the then small actor in the comedy,
whose hopes it had raised so high: "I left, at a great many other doors,
a great many circulars calling attention to the merits of the
establishment. Yet nobody ever came to school, nor do I recollect that
anybody ever proposed to come, or that the least preparation was made to
receive anybody. But I know that we got on very badly with the butcher
and baker; that very often we had not too much for dinner; and that at
last my father was arrested." The interval between the sponging-house
and the prison was passed by the sorrowful lad in running errands and
carrying messages for the prisoner, delivered with swollen eyes and
through shining tears; and the last words said to him by his father
before he was finally carried to the Marshalsea were to the effect that
the sun was set upon him forever. "I really believed at the time," said
Dickens to me, "that they had broken my heart." He took afterwards ample
revenge for this false alarm by making all the world laugh at them in
_David Copperfield_.

The readers of Mr. Micawber's history who remember David's first visit
to the Marshalsea prison, and how upon seeing the turnkey he recalled
the turnkey in the blanket in _Roderick Random_, will read with curious
interest what follows, written as a personal experience of fact two or
three years before the fiction had even entered into his thoughts:

"My father was waiting for me in the lodge, and we went up to his room
(