My Dear Felton:  Many and many happy New Years to you and yours!  As many happy children as may be quite convenient (no more)! and as many happy meetings between them and our children, and between you and us, as the kind fates in their utmost kindness shall favorably decree!

The American book (to begin with that) has been a most complete and thorough-going success.  Four large editions have now been sold and paid for, and it has won golden opinions from all sorts of men, except our friend in F——­, who is a miserable creature; a disappointed man in great poverty, to whom I have ever been most kind and considerate (I need scarcely say that); and another friend in B——­, no less a person than an illustrious gentleman named ——­, who wrote a story called ——.  They have done no harm, and have fallen short of their mark, which, of course, was to annoy me.  Now I am perfectly free from any diseased curiosity in such respects, and whenever I hear of a notice of this kind, I never read it; whereby I always conceive (don’t you?) that I get the victory.  With regard to your slave-owners, they may cry, till they are as black in the face as their own slaves, that Dickens lies.  Dickens does not write for their satisfaction, and Dickens will not explain for their comfort.  Dickens has the name and date of every newspaper in which every one of those advertisements appeared, as they know perfectly well; but Dickens does not choose to give them, and will not at any time between this and the day of judgment....

I have been hard at work on my new book, of which the first number has just appeared.  The Paul Joneses who pursue happiness and profit at other men’s cost will no doubt enable you to read it, almost as soon as you receive this.  I hope you will like it.  And I particularly commend, my dear Felton, one Mr. Pecksniff and his daughters to your tender regards.  I have a kind of liking for them myself.

Blessed star of morning, such a trip as we had into Cornwall, just after Longfellow went away!  The “we” means Forster, Maclise, Stanfield (the renowned marine painter), and the Inimitable Boz.  We went down into Devonshire by the railroad, and there we hired an open carriage from an innkeeper, patriotic in all Pickwick matters, and went on with post horses.  Sometimes we travelled all night, sometimes all day, sometimes both.  I kept the joint-stock purse, ordered all the dinners, paid all the turnpikes, conducted facetious conversations with the post boys, and regulated the pace at which we travelled.  Stanfield (an old sailor) consulted an enormous map on all disputed points of wayfaring; and referred, moreover, to a pocket-compass and other scientific instruments.  The luggage was in Forster’s department; and Maclise, having nothing particular to do, sang songs.  Heavens!  If you could have seen the necks of bottles—­distracting in their immense varieties of shape—­peering