Wert thou to plant the bean in the nursery-tale, thou wouldst make out, so soon as it began to germinate, that the castle of the giant was about to elevate its battlements on the top of it.

All that happens to thee gets a touch of the wonderful and the sublime from thy own rich imagination.

Didst ever see what artists call a Claude Lorraine glass, which spreads its own particular hue over the whole landscape which you see through it ?--thou beholdest ordinary events just through such a medium.
I have looked carefully at the facts of thy last long letter, and they are just such as might have befallen any little truant of the High School, who had got down to Leith Sands, gone beyond the PRAWN-DUB, wet his hose and shoon, and, finally, had been carried home, in compassion, by some high-kilted fishwife, cursing all the while the trouble which the brat occasioned her.
I admire the figure which thou must have made, clinging for dear life behind the old fellow's back--thy jaws chattering with fear, thy muscles cramped with anxiety.

Thy execrable supper of broiled salmon, which was enough to ensure the nightmare's regular visits for a twelvemonth, may be termed a real affliction; but as for the storm of Thursday last (such, I observe, was the date), it roared, whistled, howled, and bellowed, as fearfully amongst the old chimney-heads in the Candlemaker Row, as it could on the Solway shore, for the very wind of it--TESTE ME PER TOTAM NOCTEM VIGILANTE.

And then in the morning again, when--Lord help you--in your sentimental delicacy you bid the poor man adieu, without even tendering him half a crown for supper and lodging! You laugh at me for giving a penny (to be accurate, though, thou shouldst have said sixpence) to an old fellow, whom thou, in thy high flight, wouldst have sent home supperless, because he was like Solon or Belisarius.