d in a
silver curl-paper that I myself took off the shining locks of the
ever-beautiful old lady in Threadneedle Street, London city. I wouldn't
tell you so, if I hadn't the paper to show, or you mightn't believe it
even of me. Now, what else is it? It's a man-trap, and a hand-cuff, the
parish stocks and a leg-lock, all in gold and all in one. Now, what else
is it? It's a wedding-ring!"

As for something far better than any mere taste of his skill as a
satirist, see the whole of his delectable take off--in contradistinction
to himself, the itinerant Cheap Jack--of the political Dear Jack in the
public marketplace.

As for his philanthropy, it is unobtrusively proclaimed by the drift
of his whole narrative, and especially by two or three among the more
remarkable of its closing incidents.

As for his powers as a humorist, they may be found there _passim_, being
scattered broadcast all through his autobiographic recollections.

To those recollections are we not indebted for a whole gallery of
inimitable delineations? The Cheap Jack's very dog, for instance, who
had taught himself out of his own head to growl at any person in the
crowd that bid as low as sixpence! Or Pickleson the giant, with a
little head and less in it. Of whom, observes Doctor Marigold, "He was
a languid young man, which I attribute to the distance betwixt his
extremities." About whom, when a sixpence is given to him by Doctor
Marigold, the latter remarks in a preposterous parenthesis, "(for he
was kept as short as he was long!)" As for Dickens's high falsetto, when
speaking in the person of this same Pickleson, with a voice that, as
Doctor Marigold says, seemed to come from his eyebrows, it was only just
a shade more excruciatingly ridiculous than his guttural and growling
objurgations in the character of the giant's proprietor, the fe-rocious
Mim.

With all his modest appetite for the simpler pleasures of existence,
Doctor Marigold betrays in one instance, by the way, the taste of a
_gourmet_. "I knocked up a beefsteak-pudding for one," he says, "with
two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms thrown in:"
adding, with a fine touch of nature drawn from experience, "It's a
pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two
bottom buttons of his waistcoat."

Incomparably the finest portion of all this wonderfully original sketch
of Doctor Marigold, both in the Writing and in the Reading, was that in
which the poor Ch