green; and all the Crummles
company of comedians, with the Gil Blas troop; and Sir Roger de
Coverley; and the greatest of all crazy gentlemen, the Knight of La
Mancha, with his blessed squire? I say to you, I look rather wistfully
towards the window, musing upon these people. Were any of them to enter,
I think I should not be very much frightened. Dear old friends, what
pleasant hours I have had with them! We do not see each other very
often, but when we do, we are ever happy to meet. I had a capital
half-hour with Jacob Faithful last night; when the last sheet was
corrected, when "Finis" had been written, and the printer's boy, with
the copy, was safe in Green Arbor Court.

So you are gone, little printer's boy, with the last scratches and
corrections on the proof, and a fine flourish by way of Finis at the
story's end. The last corrections? I say those last corrections seem
never to be finished. A plague upon the weeds! Every day, when I walk in
my own little literary garden-plot, I spy some, and should like to have
a spud, and root them out. Those idle words, neighbor, are past remedy.
That turning back to the old pages produces anything but elation of
mind. Would you not pay a pretty fine to be able to cancel some of them?
Oh, the sad old pages, the dull old pages! Oh, the cares, the ennui, the
squabbles, the repetitions, the old conversations over and over again!
But now and again a kind thought is recalled, and now and again a dear
memory. Yet a few chapters more, and then the last: after which, behold
Finis itself come to an end, and the Infinite begun.

ON A PEAL OF BELLS.

As some bells in a church hard by are making a great holiday clanging in
the summer afternoon, I am reminded somehow of a July day, a garden,
and a great clanging of bells years and years ago, on the very day when
George IV. was crowned. I remember a little boy lying in that garden
reading his first novel. It was called the "Scottish Chiefs." The
little boy (who is now ancient and not little) read this book in the
summer-house of his great grandmamma. She was eighty years of age then.
A most lovely and picturesque old lady, with a long tortoise-shell cane,
with a little puff, or tour, of snow-white (or was it powdered?) hair
under her cap, with the prettiest little black-velvet slippers and high
heels you ever saw. She had a grandson, a lieutenant in the navy; son
of her son, a captain in the navy; grandson of her husband, a captai