ish which one man devours, another
dislikes. Is the dinner of to-day not to your taste? Let us hope
to-morrow's entertainment will be more agreeable. . . . I resume my
original subject. What an odd, pleasant, humorous, melancholy feeling it
is to sit in the study, alone and quiet, now all these people are gone
who have been boarding and lodging with me for twenty months! They have
interrupted my rest: they have plagued me at all sorts of minutes: they
have thrust themselves upon me when I was ill, or wished to be idle, and
I have growled out a "Be hanged to you, can't you leave me alone now?"
Once or twice they have prevented my going out to dinner. Many and many
a time they have prevented my coming home, because I knew they were
there waiting in the study, and a plague take them! and I have left home
and family, and gone to dine at the Club, and told nobody where I went.
They have bored me, those people. They have plagued me at all sorts of
uncomfortable hours. They have made such a disturbance in my mind
and house, that sometimes I have hardly known what was going on in my
family, and scarcely have heard what my neighbor said to me. They are
gone at last; and you would expect me to be at ease? Far from it. I
should almost be glad if Woolcomb would walk in and talk to me; or
Twysden reappear, take his place in that chair opposite me, and begin
one of his tremendous stories.

Madmen, you know, see visions, hold conversations with, even draw the
likeness of, people invisible to you and me. Is this making of
people out of fancy madness? and are novel-writers at all entitled to
strait-waistcoats? I often forget people's names in life; and in my own
stories contritely own that I make dreadful blunders regarding them; but
I declare, my dear sir, with respect to the personages introduced into
your humble servant's fables, I know the people utterly--I know the
sound of their voices. A gentleman came in to see me the other day,
who was so like the picture of Philip Firmin in Mr. Walker's charming
drawings in the cornhill Magazine, that he was quite a curiosity to me.
The same eyes, beard, shoulders, just as you have seen them from month
to month. Well, he is not like the Philip Firmin in my mind. Asleep,
asleep in the grave, lies the bold, the generous, the reckless,
the tender-hearted creature whom I have made to pass through those
adventures which have just been brought to an end. It is years since I
heard the laughter ringin