“Heart Treasures of Precious Moments with Literature’s Departed Monarch.”  A lecture.  By Miss Serena Amelia Tryphenia McSpadden, who still wears, and will always wear, a glove upon the hand made sacred by the clasp of Dickens.  Only Death shall remove it.

“Readings from Dickens.”  By Mrs. J. O’Hooligan Murphy, who washed for him.

“Familiar Talks with the Great Author.”  A narrative lecture.  By John Thomas, for two weeks his valet in America.

And so forth, and so on.  This isn’t half the list.  The man who has a “Toothpick once used by Charles Dickens” will have to have a hearing; and the man who “once rode in an omnibus with Charles Dickens;” and the lady to whom Charles Dickens “granted the hospitalities of his umbrella during a storm;” and the person who “possesses a hole which once belonged in a handkerchief owned by Charles Dickens.”  Be patient and long-suffering, good people, for even this does not fill up the measure of what you must endure next winter.  There is no creature in all this land who has had any personal relations with the late Mr. Dickens, however slight or trivial, but will shoulder his way to the rostrum and inflict his testimony upon his helpless countrymen.  To some people it is fatal to be noticed by greatness.

THE TONE-IMPARTING COMMITTEE

I get old and ponderously respectable, only one thing will be able to make me truly happy, and that will be to be put on the Venerable Tone-Imparting committee of the city of New York, and have nothing to do but sit on the platform, solemn and imposing, along with Peter Cooper, Horace Greeley, etc., etc., and shed momentary fame at second hand on obscure lecturers, draw public attention to lectures which would otherwise clack eloquently to sounding emptiness, and subdue audiences into respectful hearing of all sorts of unpopular and outlandish dogmas and isms.  That is what I desire for the cheer and gratification of my gray hairs.  Let me but sit up there with those fine relics of the Old Red Sandstone Period and give Tone to an intellectual entertainment twice a week, and be so reported, and my happiness will be complete.  Those men have been my envy for long, long time.  And no memories of my life are so pleasant as my reminiscence of their long and honorable career in the Tone-imparting service.  I can recollect that first time I ever saw them on the platforms just as well as I can remember the events of yesterday.  Horace Greeley sat on the right, Peter Cooper on the left, and Thomas Jefferson, Red Jacket, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock sat between them.  This was on the 22d of December, 1799, on the occasion of the state’ funeral of George Washington in New York.  It was a great day, that—­a great day, and a very, very sad one.  I remember that Broadway was one mass of black crape from Castle Garden nearly up to where the City Hall now stands.  The next