It was a dingy, brick house surrounded by a high wall, but cheerful and cozy within.

I found him in his sanctum, a singularly shaped room, with statuettes of Sam Weller and others of his creations on the mantelpiece.

A portrait of his beautiful wife was upon the wall--that wife, the separation from whom threw a strange, sad shadow over his home.

How handsome he was then! With his deep, dark, lustrous eyes, that you saw yourself in, and the merry mouth wreathed with laughter, and the luxuriant mass of dark hair that he wore in a sort of stack over his lofty forehead! He had a slight lisp in his pleasant voice, and ran on in rapid talk for an hour, with a shy reluctance to talk about his own works, but with the most superabounding vivacity I have ever met with in any man.

His two daughters, one of whom afterward married the younger Collins, a brother novelist, were then schoolgirls of eight and ten years, came in, with books in their hands, to give their father a good-morning kiss.