MRS LIRRIPER'S LEGACY.

THE EXTRA CHRISTMAS NUMBER OF ALL THE YEAR ROUND.
CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

CONTAINING THE AMOUNT OF TWO ORDINARY NUMBERS.

CHRISTMAS, 1864.

Price 4d.

INDEX.

I. MRS. LIRRIPER RELATES HOW SHE WENT ON, AND WENT OVER page 1

II. A PAST LODGER RELATES A WILD LEGEND OF A DOCTOR page 11

III. ANOTHER PAST LODGER RELATES HIS EXPERIENCE AS A POOR RELATION
page 18

IV. ANOTHER PAST LODGER RELATES WHAT LOT HE DREW AT GLUMPER HOUSE page 24

V. ANOTHER PAST LODGER RELATES HIS OWN GHOST STORY
page 35

VI. ANOTHER PAST LODGER RELATES CERTAIN PASSAGES TO HER HUSBAND
page 40

VII. MRS. LIRRIPER RELATES HOW JEMMY TOPPED UP
page 47

  I.

MRS. LIRRIPER RELATES
HOW SHE WENT ON, AND WENT OVER.

AH! It's pleasant to drop into my own easy-chair
my dear though a little palpitating what
with trotting up-stairs and what with trotting
down, and why kitchen-stairs should all be corner
stairs is for the builders to justify though I do
not think they fully understand their trade and
never did, else why the sameness and why not
more conveniences and fewer draughts and likewise
making a practice of laying the plaster on
too thick I am well convinced which holds the
damp, and as to chimney-pots putting them on
by guess-work like hats at a party and no more
knowing what their effect will be upon the
smoke bless you than I do if so much, except
that it will mostly be either to send it down
your throat in a straight form or give it a
twist before it goes there. And what I says speaking
as I find of those new metal chimneys all
manner of shapes (there's a row of 'em at Miss
Wozenham's lodging-house lower down on the
other side of the way) is that they only work your
smoke into artificial patterns for you before you
swallow it and that I'd quite as soon swallow
mine plain, the flavour being the same, not to
mention the conceit of putting up signs on the
top of your house to show the forms in which
you take your smoke into your inside.

Being here before your eyes my dear in my
own easy-chair in my own quiet room in my
own Lodging House Number Eighty-one
Norfolk-street Strand London situated midway between
the City and St. James's—if anything is
where it used to be with these hotels calling
themselves Limited but called Unlimited by
Major Jackman rising up everywhere and rising
up into flagstaffs where they can't go any higher,
but my mind of those monsters is give me a
landlord's or landlady's wholesome face when I
come off a journey and not a brass plate with an
electrified number clicking out of it which it's not
in nature can be glad to see me and to which I
don't want to be hoisted like molasses at the
Docks and left there telegraphing for help with
the most ingenious instruments but quite in vain
—being here my dear I have no call to mention
that I am still in the Lodgings as a business
hoping to die in the same and if agreeable to the
clergy partly read over at Saint Clement's Danes
and concluded in Hatfield churchyard when lying
once again by my poor Lirriper ashes to ashes
and dust to dust.

Neither should I tell you any news my dear in
telling you that the Major is still a fixture in
the Parlours quite as much so as the roof of the
house, and that Jemmy is of boys the best and
brightest and has ever had kept from him the
cruel story of his poor pretty young mother Mrs.
Edson being deserted in the second floor and
dying in my arms, fully believing that I am his
born Gran and him an orphan, though what with
engineering since he took a taste for it and him
and the Major making Locomotives out of parasols
broken iron pots and cotton-reels and them
absolutely a getting off the line and falling over
the table and injuring the passengers almost
equal to the originals it really is quite wonderful.
And when I says to the Major, "Major
can't you by any means give us a communication
with the guard?" the Major says quite
huffy, "No madam it's not to be done," and
when I says " Why not?" the Major says,
"That is between us who are in the Railway
Interest madam and our friend the Right
Honourable Vice-President of the Board of Trade"
and if you'll believe me my dear the Major
wrote to Jemmy at school to consult him on
the answer I should have before I could get even
that amount of unsatisfactoriness out of the
man, the reason being that when we first began
with the little model and the working signals
beautiful and perfect (being in general as wrong
as the real) and when I says laughing "What