as only the next best thing to hearing him and seeing
him, still in the person of Jack Hopkins, relate the memorable anecdote
about the child swallowing the necklace--pronounced in Jack Hopkins's
abbreviated articulation of it, _neck-luss_--a word repeated by him
a round dozen times at the least within a few seconds in the reading
version of that same anecdote. How characteristically and comically the
abbreviations were multiplied for the delivery of it, by the very voice
and in the very person, as it were, of Jack Hopkins, who shall say! As,
for example--"Sister, industrious girl, seldom treated herself to bit
of finery, cried eyes out, at loss of--neck-luss; looked high and low
for--neck-luss. Few days afterwards, family at dinner--baked, shoulder
of mutton and potatoes, child wasn't hungry, playing about the room,
when family suddenly heard devil of a noise like small hail-storm."
How abbreviated passages like these look, as compared with the
original--could only be rendered comprehensible upon the instant, by
giving in this place a facsimile of one of the pages relating to Jack
Hopkins's immortal story about the--neck-luss, exactly as it appears
in the marked copy of the Reading of "Mr. Bob Sawyer's Party," a page
covered all over, as will be observed, with minute touches in the
Novelist's own handwriting.

Nothing at all in the later version of this Reading was said about the
prim person in cloth boots, who unsuccessfully attempted all through the
evening to make a joke. Of him the readers of "Pickwick" will very well
remember it to have been related that he commenced a long story about
a great public character, whose name he had forgotten, making a
particularly happy reply to another illustrious individual whom he had
never been able to identify, and, after enlarging with great minuteness
upon divers collateral circumstances distantly connected with the
anecdote, could not for the life of him recollect at that precise
moment what the anecdote was--although he had been in the habit, for the
last ten years, of telling the story with great applause! While disposed
to regret the omission of this preposterously natural incident from the
revised version of the Reading, and especially Bob Sawyer's concluding
remark in regard to it, that he should very much like to hear the end of
it, for, _so far as it went_, it was, without exception, the very best
story he had ever heard--we were more than compensated by another
revisi