man looking diminished from a very much longer one by shrinkage in thickish wrinkles from the shoulders to the shanks.  His hat is enormous and very gay.  He is rather of sad countenance.  An elevation of his collar behind the ears, and pointed at the neck, gives you notions of his having dropped from some hook.  He stands with his forefinger extended, like a disused semaphore-post, that seems tumbling and desponding on the hill by the highroad, in his attitude while telling the tale; if standing it may be called, where the whole figure appears imploring for a seat.  That was his natural position, as one would suppose any artist must have thought, and a horse beneath him.  But it has been suggested that the artist in question was no painter of animals.  Then why did he not get a painter of animals to put in the horse?  It is vain to ask, though it is notorious that artists combine without bickering to do these things; and one puts his name on the animal, the other on the human being or landscape.

My informant adds, that the prominent feature, telling a melancholy tale of its own, is of sanguine colour, and while plainly in the act of speaking, Charles Dump might be fancied about to drop off to sleep.  He was impressed by the dreaminess of the face; and I must say I regard him as an interesting character.  During my girlhood Napoleon Bonaparte alone would have been his rival for filling an inn along our roads.  I have known our boys go to bed obediently and get up at night to run three miles to the WHEATSHEAF, only to stand on the bench or traveller’s-rest outside the window and look in at Charles Dump reciting, with just room enough in the crowd to point his finger, as his way was.

He left a child, Mary Dump, who grew up to become lady’s maid to Livia Fakenham, daughter of Curtis, the beauty of Hampshire, equalled by no one save her cousin Henrietta Fakenham, the daughter of Commodore Baldwin; and they were two different kinds of beauties, not to be compared, and different were their fortunes; for this lady was likened to the sun going down on a cloudy noon, and that lady to the moon riding through a stormy night.  Livia was the young widow of Lord Duffield when she accepted the Earl of Fleetwood, and was his third countess, and again a widow at eight-and-twenty, and stepmother to young Croesus, the Earl of Fleetwood of my story.  Mary Dump testifies to her kindness of heart to her dependents.  If we are to speak of goodness, I am afraid there are other witnesses.

I resent being warned that my time is short and that I have wasted much of it over ‘the attractive Charles.’  What I have done I have done with a purpose, and it must be a storyteller devoid of the rudiments of his art who can complain of my dwelling on Charles Dump, for the world to have a pause and pin its faith to him, which it would not do to a grander person—­that is, as a peg.  Wonderful events, however true they are, must be