ream-wife's remark, "You're in spirits,
Tugby, my dear!"--Tugby's fat, gasping response, "No,--No. Not
particular. I'm a little elewated. The muffins came so pat!" Though,
even if that addition had been vouchsafed, we should still, no doubt,
have hungered for the descriptive particulars that followed, relating
not only how the former hall-porter chuckled until he was black in the
face--having so much ado, in fact, to become any other colour, that
his fat legs made the strangest excursions into the air--but that Mrs.
Tugby, that is, Chickenstalker, after thumping him violently on the
back, and shaking him as if he were a bottle, was constrained to cry
out, in great terror, "Good gracious, goodness, lord-a-mercy, bless
and save the man! What's he a-doing?" To which all that Mr. Tugby can
faintly reply, as he wipes his eyes, is, that he finds himself a little
"elewated!"

Another omission in the Reading was, if possible, yet more surprising,
namely, the whole of Will Fern's finest speech: an address full of
rustic eloquence that one can't help feeling sure would have told
wonderfully as Dickens could have delivered it. However, the story,
foreshortened though it was, precisely as he related it, was told with
a due regard to its artistic completeness. Margaret and Lilian, the
old ticket-porter and the young blacksmith, were the principal
interlocutors. Like the melodrama of Victorine, it all turned out,
of course, to be no more than "the baseless fabric of a vision," the
central incidents of the tale, at any rate, being composed of "such
stuff as dreams are made of." How it all came to be evolved by
the "Chimes" from the slumbering brain of the queer, little old
ticket-porter was related more fully and more picturesquely, no doubt,
in the printed narrative, but in the Reading, at the least, it was
depicted with more dramatic force and passion. The merest glimmering,
however, was afforded of the ghostly or elfin spectacle, as seen by
the "mind's eye" of the dreamer, and which in the book itself was
so important an integral portion of the tale, as there unfolded,
constituting, as it did, for that matter, the very soul or spirit of
what was meant by "The Chimes."

Speaking of the collective chimes of a great city, Victor Hugo has
remarked in his prose masterpiece that, in an ordinary way, the noise
issuing from a vast capital is the talking of the city, that at night it
is the breathing of the city, but that when the bells a