ss of John Browdie's cordial
shake-of-the-hand with Nicholas Nickleby on their encountering each
other by accident upon the high road. "Shake honds? Ah! that I weel!"
coupled with his ecstatic shout (so ecstatic that his horse shyed at
it), "Beatten schoolmeasther! Ho! ho! ho! Beatten schoolmeasther!
Who ever heard o' the loike o' that, noo? Give us thee hond agean,
yoongster! Beatten schoolmeasther! Dang it, I loove thee for 't!"
Finally, and as the perfecting touch of tenderness between the two
cousins, then unknown to each other as such, in the early morning light
at Boroughbridge, we caught a glimpse of Nicholas and Smike passing,
hand in hand, out of the old barn together.

MR. BOB SAWYER'S PARTY.

Quite as exhilarating in its way as the all-but dramatised report of the
great breach of promise case tried before Mr. Justice Stareleigh, was
that other condensation of a chapter from "Pickwick," descriptive of
Mr. Bob Sawyer's Party. It was a Reading, in the delivery of which
the Reader himself had evidently the keenest sense of enjoyment. As
a humorous description, it was effervescent with fun, being written
throughout in the happiest, earliest style of the youthful genius of
Boz, when the green numbers were first shaking the sides of lettered and
unlettered Englishmen alike with Homeric laughter. Besides this, when
given by him as a Reading, it comprised within it one of his very
drollest impersonations. If only as the means of introducing us to Jack
Hopkins, it would have been most acceptable. But, inimitable though Jack
was, he was, at the least, thoroughly well companioned.

As a relish of what was coming, there was that preliminary account of
the locality in which the festivities were held, to wit, Lant Street, in
the borough of Southwark, the prevailing repose of which, we were
told, "sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul"--fully justifying its
selection as a haven of rest by any one who wished "to abstract himself
from the world, to remove himself from the reach of temptation, to place
himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of
window!" As specimens of animated nature, familiarly met with in the
neighbourhood, "the pot-boy, the muffin youth, and the baked potato
man," had about them a perennial freshness. Whenever we were reminded,
again, in regard to the principal characteristics of the population that
it was migratory, "usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and
gene