to my much-injured hostess; it contained the
words "sudden indisposition," neatly placed in
the centre of a surrounding network of polite
phraseology; and when I had sealed it up, and
sent it off upon the spot, I was, without any
exception whatever, the happiest man, at that
moment, in all London. This is a startling
confession to make, in a moral point of view. But
the interests of truth are paramount (except
where one's host and hostess are concerned); and
there are unhappily crimes, in this wicked world,
which not bring with them the slightest sense
of misery to the perpetrator.

Of the means by which I contrived, after basely
securing the privilege of staying at home, to get
up a nice, cool, solitary, impromptu dinner in
my own room, and of the dinner itself, no record
shall appear in these pages. In my humble
opinion, modern writers of comic literature have
already gorged the English public to nausea
with incessant eating and drinking in print.
Now-a-days, when a man has nothing whatever
to say, he seems to me to write, in a kind of
gluttonous despair, about his dinner. I, for one,
am tired of literary gentlemen who unaccountably
take it for granted that I am interested in
knowing when they are hungry; who appear to
think that there is something exquisitely new,
humorous, and entertaining, in describing
themselves as swallowing large quantities of beer;
who can tell me nothing about their adventures
at home and abroad, draw me no characters, and
make me no remarks, without descending into
the kitchen to fortify themselves and their
paragraphs with perpetual victuals and drink. I am
really and truly suffering so acutely from the
mental dyspepsia consequent on my own inability
to digest other people's meals, as served up in
modern literature, that the bare idea of ever
writing about breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or
supper, in my own proper person, has become
absolutely revolting to me. Let my comic
brethren of the pen feed in public as complacently
and as copiously as they please. For
myself, if I live a hundred years, and write a
thousand volumes, no English reader—I
solemnly declare it—shall ever know what I have
had for dinner, in any part of the world, or
under any stress of gastronomic circumstances.
Dismissing my lonely meal, therefore, with the
briefest possible reference to it, let me get on to
the evening, and to the singular—or, as my
friends consider it, to the crack-brained—
occupation by which I contrived to enliven my
self-imposed solitude.

It was approaching nine o'clock, and I was
tasting the full luxury of my own cool seclusion,
when the idea struck me that there was only one
thing wanting to complete my sense of perfect
happiness. I rose with a malicious joy in my
heart; I threw my lightest paletot over my
shoulders, put on a straw hat, pulled up my
slippers at the heel, and directed my steps to
the house of my friend and host, from whose
dinner-party "sudden indisposition" had
compelled me to be absent. What was my object in
taking this extraordinary course? The diabolical
object—for surely it can be qualified by no other
term—of gloating over the sufferings of my polite
fellow-creatures in the dining-room, from the cool
and secret vantage-ground of the open street.

Nine o'clock had struck before I got to the
house. A little crowd of street idlers—cool
and comfortable vagabonds, happily placed out
of the pale of Society—was assembled on the
pavement, before the dining-room windows. I
joined them, in my airy and ungentlemanlike
costume—I joined them, with the sensations of
a man who is about to investigate the nature of
some great danger from which he has just
narrowly escaped. As I had foreseen, the
suffocating male guests had drawn up the blinds on
the departure of the ladies to the drawing-room,
so as to get every available breath of air into
the dining-room, reckless of all inquisitive
observation on the part of the lower orders in the
street outside. Between us—I willingly identify
myself, on this occasion, with the mob—and
the gorgeously-appointed dessert-service of my
friend and host, nothing intervened but the area
railings and the low, transparent, wire window-
blinds. We stood together sociably on the pavement
and stared in. My brethren of the mob
surveyed the magnificent epergne, the decanters
glittering under the light of the chandelier, the
fruit, flowers, and porcelain on the table; while
I, on my side, occupied myself with the human
interest of the scene, and looked with indescribable
interest and relish at the guests.

There they were, all oozing away into silence
and insensibility together; smothered in their
heavy black coats, and strangled in their stiff
white cravats!  On one side of the table,
Jenkins, Wapshare, and two strangers, all four
equally speechless, all four equally gentlemanly,
all four equally prostrated by the lights, the
dinner, and the heat. I can see the two
strangers feebly dabbing their foreheads with
white pocket-handkerchiefs; Jenkins is slyly
looking at his watch; the head of Wapshare
hangs helplessly over his finger-glass. At the
end of the table, I discern the back of my
injured host—it leans feebly and crookedly against
the chair—it is such a faint back to look at, on
this melancholy occasion, that his own tailor
would hardly know it again. On the other side
of the table, there are three guests only:
Soward, fast asleep, and steaming with the heat;
Ripsher, wide awake, and glittering with the
heat; and Pilkington—the execrable Pilkington,
the scourge of society, the longest, loudest,
cruelest, and densest bore in existence—
Pilkington alone of all this miserable company still
wags complacently his unresting tongue. There
is a fourth place vacant by his side. My place,
beyond a doubt. Horrible thought!  I see my
own ghost sitting there: the appearance of that
perspiring spectre is too dreadful to be
described. I shudder in my convenient front
place against the area railings, as I survey my
own full-dressed Fetch at the dinner-table—I
turn away my face in terror, and look for
comfort at my street-companions, my worthy fellow
outcasts, watching with me on either side. One