out of the carriage pockets!  If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the wild attachment of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters.  If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy sea-shore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights where the unspeakably green water was roaring, I don’t know how many hundred feet below!  If you could have seen but one gleam of the bright fires by which we sat in the big rooms of ancient inns at night, until long after the small hours had come and gone, or smelt but one steam of the HOT punch (not white, dear Felton, like that amazing compound I sent you a taste of, but a rich, genial, glowing brown) which came in every evening in a huge broad china bowl!  I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey.  It would have done you good to hear me.  I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckle off the back of my stock, all the way.  And Stanfield (who is very much of your figure and temperament, but fifteen years older) got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him.  Seriously, I do believe there never was such a trip.  And they made such sketches, those two men, in the most romantic of our halting-places, that you would have sworn we had the Spirit of Beauty with us, as well as the Spirit of Fun.  But stop till you come to England,—­I say no more.

The actuary of the national debt couldn’t calculate the number of children who are coming here on Twelfth Night, in honor of Charley’s birthday, for which occasion I have provided a magic lantern and divers other tremendous engines of that nature.  But the best of it is that Forster and I have purchased between us the entire stock in trade of a conjurer, the practice and display whereof is intrusted to me.  And O my dear eyes, Felton, if you could see me conjuring the company’s watches into impossible tea-caddies, and causing pieces of money to fly, and burning pocket-handkerchiefs without hurting ’em, and practising in my own room, without anybody to admire, you would never forget as long as you live.  In those tricks which require a confederate, I am assisted (by reason of his imperturbable good-humor) by Stanfield, who always does his part exactly the wrong way, to the unspeakable delight of all beholders.  We come out on a small scale, to-night, at Forster’s, where we see the old year out and the new one in.  Particulars of shall be forwarded in my next.

I have quite made up my mind that F——­ really believes he does know you personally, and has all his life.  He talks to me about you with such gravity that I am afraid to grin, and feel it necessary to look quite serious.  Sometimes he tells me things about you, doesn’t ask me, you know, so that I am occasionally perplexed beyond all telling, and begin to think it was