Wherefore I indite a monstrously short and wildly uninteresting epistle
to the American Dando; but perhaps you don't know who Dando was. He was
an oyster-eater, my dear Felton. He used to go into oyster-shops,
without a farthing of money, and stand at the counter eating natives,
until the man who opened them grew pale, cast down his knife, staggered
backward, struck his white forehead with his open hand, and cried, "You
are Dando!!!" He has been known to eat twenty dozen at one sitting, and
would have eaten forty, if the truth had not flashed upon the
shopkeeper. For these offences he was constantly committed to the House
of Correction. During his last imprisonment he was taken ill, got worse
and worse, and at last began knocking violent double knocks at Death's
door. The doctor stood beside his bed, with his fingers on his pulse.
"He is going," says the doctor. "I see it in his eye. There is only one
thing that would keep life in him for another hour, and that
is--oysters." They were immediately brought. Dando swallowed eight, and
feebly took a ninth. He held it in his mouth and looked round the bed
strangely. "Not a bad one, is it?" says the doctor. The patient shook
his head, rubbed his trembling hand upon his stomach, bolted the oyster,
and fell back--dead. They buried him in the prison-yard, and paved his
grave with oyster-shells.

We are all well and hearty, and have already begun to wonder what time
next year you and Mrs. Felton and Dr. Howe will come across the briny
sea together. To-morrow we go to the seaside for two months. I am
looking out for news of Longfellow, and shall be delighted when I know
that he is on his way to London and this house.

I am bent upon striking at the piratical newspapers with the sharpest
edge I can put upon my small axe, and hope in the next session of
Parliament to stop their entrance into Canada. For the first time within
the memory of man, the professors of English literature seem disposed to
act together on this question. It is a good thing to aggravate a
scoundrel, if one can do nothing else, and I think we _can_ make them
smart a little in this way. . . .

I wish you had been at Greenwich the other day, where a party of friends
gave me a private dinner; public ones I have refused. C---- was
perfectly wild at the reunion, and, after singing all manner of marine
songs, wound up the entertainment by coming home (six miles) in a
little open phaeton of mine, _on his head_, to