"It seems the poorest nonsense in the world to turn to anything else, that is, seems to me being fresher in respect of Lady De Lancey than you--but my raven's dead. He had been ailing for a few days but not seriously, as we thought, and was apparently recovering, when symptoms of relapse occasioned me to send for an eminent medical gentleman one Herring (a bird fancier in the New Road), who promptly attended and administered a powerful dose of castor oil. This was on Tuesday last. On Wednesday morning he had another dose of castor oil and a tea cup full of warm gruel, which he took with great relish and under the influence of which he so far recovered his spirits as to be enabled to bite the groom severely. At 12 o'clock at noon he took several turns up and down the stable with a grave, sedate air, and suddenly reeled. This made him thoughtful. He stopped directly, shook his head, moved on again, stopped once more, cried in a tone of remonstrance and considerable surprise, 'Halloa old girl!' and immediately died. "He has left a rather large property (in cheese and halfpence) buried, for security's sake, in various parts of the garden. I am not without suspicions of poison. A butcher was heard to threaten him some weeks since, and he stole a clasp knife belonging to a vindictive carpenter, which was never found. For these reasons, I directed a post-mortem examination, preparatory to the body being stuffed; the result of it has not yet reached me. The medical gentleman broke out the fact of his decease to me with great delicacy, observing that 'the jolliest queer start had taken place with that 'ere knowing card of a bird, as ever he see'd'--but the shock was naturally very great. With reference to the jollity of the start, it appears that a raven dying at two hundred and fifty or thereabouts, is looked upon as an infant. This one would hardly, as I may say, have been born for a century or so to come, being only two or three years old. "I want to know more about the promised 'tickler'--when it's to come, what it's to be, and in short all about it--that I may give it the better welcome. I don't know how it is, but I am celebrated either for writing no letters at all or for the briefest specimens of epistolary correspondence in existence, and here I am--in writing to you--on the sixth side! I won't make it a seventh anyway; so with love to all your home circle, and from all mine, I am now and always, "Faithfully yours, "CHARLES DICKENS. "I am glad you like Barnaby. I have great designs in store, but am sadly cramped at first for room." APPENDIX B BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LADY DE LANCEY'S NARRATIVE _Reminiscences_, by Samuel Rogers, under the heading: "Duke of Wellington," p. 210. _Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore_, edited by Lord John Russell, Journal of 29th August 1824, vol. iv., p. 240. _Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington_, by Earl Stanhope, p. 182.