grateful task of bringing him home in triumph with an enthusiastic mob.

"I needn't say," observed the locksmith, when his house in Clerkenwell
was reached at last, and he and Barnaby were safe within, "that, except
among ourselves, _I_ didn't want to make a triumph of it. But directly
we got into the street, we were known, and the hub-bub began. Of the
two, and after experience of both, I think I'd rather be taken out of my
house by a crowd of enemies than escorted home by a mob of friends!"

At last the crowd dispersed. And Barnaby stretched himself on the ground
beside his mother's couch, and fell into a deep sleep.

* * * * *

Bleak House

"Bleak House," a story with a purpose, like most of Dickens's
works, was published when the author was forty years old. The
object of the story was to ventilate the monstrous injustice
wrought by delays in the old Court of Chancery, which defeated
all the purposes of a court of justice. Many of the
characters, who, though famous, are not essential to the
development of the story, were drawn from real life.
Turveydrop was suggested by George IV., and Inspector Bucket
was a friend of the author in the Metropolitan Police Force.
Harold Skimpole was identified with Leigh Hunt. Dickens
himself admitted the resemblance; but only in so far as none
of Skimpole's vices could be attributed to his prototype. The
original of Bleak House was a country mansion in
Hertfordshire, near St. Albans, though it is usually said to
be a summer residence of the novelist at Broadstairs.

_I.--In Chancery_

London. Implacable November weather. The Lord Chancellor sitting in
Lincoln's Inn Hall. Fog everywhere, and at the very heart of the fog
sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. The case of
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. No man alive knows what it means. It
has passed into a joke. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in
the profession.

Mr. Kenge (of Kenge and Carboy, solicitors, Lincoln's Inn) first
mentioned Jarndyce and Jarndyce to me, and told me that the costs
already amounted to from sixty to seventy thousand pounds.

My godmother, who brought me up, was just dead, and Mr. Kenge came to
tell me that Mr. Jarndyce proposed, knowing my desolate position, that I
should go to a first-rate school, where my education should be completed
and my comfo