ling companion, who was nursing between his knees quite a little
stack of walking-sticks and umbrellas, and I overheard a brief colloquy
between him and Dickens.

"Charles," said the man with the bundle, "why don't you have your name
engraved on these?"

"Good God!" said Dickens, in a tone of almost querulous indignation.
"Isn't it bad enough already?"

One can well believe that the poor great man found it hard to get about
England without being stared at, and pointed out and run after; and
we know, from his own pen, that outside his public hours he had a
self-respecting passion for privacy.

I came into contact with Dickens in a far different way in the course of
that spring. It is a little boast of mine that I was the first person in
the world to make acquaintance with Silas Wegg and Nicodemus Boffin and
Mr. Venus. My name-father, David Christie, was chief reader at Clowes'
printing office in Stamford Street, Blackfriars, and month by month
as the proofs of _Our Mutual Friend_ were printed, it was his habit
to borrow the Dickens manuscript from Mr Day, the overseer of the
establishment, and to take it home with him for his own delectation
before it reached the hands of the compositors. On each occasion, until
I left London behind me, Christie would wire me always in the same
phrase: "Dickens is here," and I would go down to his lodgings in Duke
Street and would read aloud to him the work fresh from the master's
hand. It was written on long ruled foolscap on rather darkish blue paper
in a pale blue ink, and it needed young eyes to decipher it. There
were only a few of such nights, but the enjoyment of them remains as a
remembrance. I shall never forget how he laughed over Mr Wegg's earlier
lapses into poetry:

"And my elder brother leaned upon his sword, Mr Boffin, And wiped away a
tear, Sir."

Hereabouts befell the first tragedy of my life. In his time Christie had
been "reader's" boy at Ballantyne's, in Edinburgh, and in that capacity
he had laid hands with a jackdaw assiduity on every scrap of literary
interest which he could secure. He had proof sheets corrected by the
hands of every notable man of his time. He had been engaged for at least
fifty years in making his collection, and he kept it all loosely tumbled
together in a big chest, which he used to tell me would become my
property on the occasion of his death. Amongst other treasures, I
remember the first uncorrected proofs of _Marmion_ and a manuscript