than twenty-four, and that, as they were the great paymasters on the railway, the Minister of the Egyptian State, who managed the railway, might probably wish to accommodate them. I often wondered who originated that frightful picture of blood and desolation. That it came from an English heart and an English hand I was always sure. From Egypt I visited the Holy Land, and on my way inspected the Post Offices at Malta and Gibraltar. I could fill a volume with true tales of my adventures. The _Tales of All Countries_ have, most of them, some foundation in such occurrences. There is one called _John Bull on the Guadalquivir_, the chief incident in which occurred to me and a friend of mine on our way up that river to Seville. We both of us handled the gold ornaments of a man whom we believed to be a bullfighter, but who turned out to be a duke,--and a duke, too, who could speak English! How gracious he was to us, and yet how thoroughly he covered us with ridicule! On my return home I received £400 from Messrs. Chapman & Hall for _Doctor Thorne_, and agreed to sell them _The Bertrams_ for the same sum. This latter novel was written under very vagrant circumstances,--at Alexandria, Malta, Gibraltar, Glasgow, then at sea, and at last finished in Jamaica. Of my journey to the West Indies I will say a few words presently, but I may as well speak of these two novels here. _Doctor Thorne_ has, I believe, been the most popular book that I have written,--if I may take the sale as a proof of comparative popularity. _The Bertrams_ has had quite an opposite fortune. I do not know that I have ever heard it well spoken of even by my friends, and I cannot remember that there is any character in it that has dwelt in the minds of novel-readers. I myself think that they are of about equal merit, but that neither of them is good. They fall away very much from _The Three Clerks_, both in pathos and humour. There is no personage in either of them comparable to Chaffanbrass the lawyer. The plot of _Doctor Thorne_ is good, and I am led therefore to suppose that a good plot,--which, to my own feeling, is the most insignificant part of a tale,--is that which will most raise it or most condemn it in the public judgment. The plots of _Tom Jones_ and of _Ivanhoe_ are almost perfect, and they are probably the most popular novels of the schools of the last and of this century; but to me the delicacy of Amelia, and the rugged strength of Burley and Meg Merrilies, say more for the power of those great novelists than the gift of construction shown in the two works I have named. A novel should give a picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos. To make that picture worthy of attention, the canvas should be crowded with real portraits, not of individuals known to the world or to the author, but of created personages impregnated with traits of character which are known. To my thinking, the plot is but the vehicle for all this; and when you