and whose gentle hand shall be laid in ours no more.  I own for my part that, in reading pages which this hand penned formerly, I often lose sight of the text under my eyes.  It is not the words I see; but that past day; that bygone page of life’s history; that tragedy, comedy it may be, which our little home company was enacting; that merry-making which we shared; that funeral which we followed; that bitter, bitter grief which we buried.

And, such being the state of my mind, I pray gentle readers to deal kindly with their humble servant’s manifold shortcomings, blunders, and slips of memory.  As sure as I read a page of my own composition, I find a fault or two, half a dozen.  Jones is called Brown.  Brown, who is dead, is brought to life.  Aghast, and months after the number was printed, I saw that I had called Philip Firmin, Clive Newcome.  Now Clive Newcome is the hero of another story by the reader’s most obedient writer.  The two men are as different, in my mind’s eye, as—­as Lord Palmerston and Mr. Disraeli let us say.  But there is that blunder at page 990, line 76, volume 84 of the Cornhill Magazine, and it is past mending; and I wish in my life I had made no worse blunders or errors than that which is hereby acknowledged.

Another Finis written.  Another mile-stone passed on this journey from birth to the next world!  Sure it is a subject for solemn cogitation.  Shall we continue this story-telling business and be voluble to the end of our age?  Will it not be presently time, O prattler, to hold your tongue, and let younger people speak?  I have a friend, a painter, who, like other persons who shall be nameless, is growing old.  He has never painted with such laborious finish as his works now show.  This master is still the most humble and diligent of scholars.  Of Art, his mistress, he is always an eager, reverent pupil.  In his calling, in yours, in mine, industry and humility will help and comfort us.  A word with you.  In a pretty large experience I have not found the men who write books superior in wit or learning to those who don’t write at all.  In regard of mere information, non-writers must often be superior to writers.  You don’t expect a lawyer in full practice to be conversant with all kinds of literature; he is too busy with his law; and so a writer is commonly too busy with his own books to be able to bestow attention on the works of other people.  After a day’s work (in which I have been depicting, let us say, the agonies of Louisa on parting with the Captain, or the atrocious behavior of the wicked Marquis to Lady Emily) I march to the Club, proposing to improve my mind and keep myself “posted up,” as the Americans phrase it, with the literature of the day.  And what happens?  Given, a walk after luncheon, a pleasing book, and a most comfortable armchair by the fire, and you know the rest.  A doze ensues.  Pleasing book drops suddenly, is picked up once with an air of some confusion, is laid presently softly in lap:  head falls on