We were saying, my Muse, before we dropped and perched on earth for a couple of sentences, that our unsaid words were in some limbo or other, as real as those we have uttered; that the thoughts which have passed through our brains are as actual as any to which our tongues and pens have given currency.  For instance, besides what is here hinted at, I have thought ever so much more about Verona:  about an early Christian church I saw there; about a great dish of rice we had at the inn; about the bugs there; about ever so many more details of that day’s journey from Milan to Venice; about Lake Garda, which lay on the way from Milan, and so forth.  I say what fine things we have thought of, haven’t we, all of us?  Ah, what a fine tragedy that was I thought of, and never wrote!  On the day of the dinner of the Oystermongers’ Company, what a noble speech I thought of in the cab, and broke down—­I don’t mean the cab, but the speech.  Ah, if you could but read some of the unwritten Roundabout Papers, how you would be amused!  Aha! my friend, I catch you saying, “Well, then, I wish this was unwritten with all my heart.”  Very good.  I owe you one.  I do confess a hit, a palpable hit.

One day in the past month, as I was reclining on the bench of thought, with that ocean The Times newspaper spread before me, the ocean cast up on the shore at my feet two famous subjects for Roundabout Papers, and I picked up those waifs, and treasured them away until I could polish them and bring them to market.  That scheme is not to be carried out.  I can’t write about those subjects.  And though I cannot write about them, I may surely tell what are the subjects I am going not to write about.

The first was that Northumberland Street encounter, which all the papers have narrated.  Have any novelists of our days a scene and catastrophe more strange and terrible than this which occurs at noonday within a few yards of the greatest thoroughfare in Europe?  At the theatres they have a new name for their melodramatic pieces, and call them “Sensation Dramas.”  What a sensation Drama this is!  What have people been flocking to see at the Adelphi Theatre for the last hundred and fifty nights?  A woman pitched overboard out of a boat, and a certain Miles taking a tremendous “header,” and bringing her to shore?  Bagatelle!  What is this compared to the real life-drama, of which a midday representation takes place just opposite the Adelphi in Northumberland Street?  The brave Dumas, the intrepid Ainsworth, the terrible Eugene Sue, the cold-shudder-inspiring “Woman in White,” the astounding author of the “Mysteries of the Court of London,” never invented anything more tremendous than this.  It might have happened to you and me.  We want to borrow a little money.  We are directed to an agent.  We propose a pecuniary transaction at a short date.  He goes into the next room, as we fancy, to get the bank-notes, and returns with “two very pretty, delicate little ivory-handled pistols,”