Mystery has an indescribable charm, which is the thing that makes me so fond of riddles; and so I determined to have a hero or a heroine, I did not care which, of a most unexampled kind. But how to invent an unexampled hero, I could not imagine. Some disgusting fellow had always done it before: even a blackamoor had been taken up--for there was that horrid Othello; a Jew--there was Sheva; a puppy--there was Pelham; a pickpocket--there was Jack Sheppard; and at last, as the sweet source of mystery, and the pleasantest one to unravel, I thought I would take myself. Yes, I would be the hero of my own book; and as to a heroine, why, one of the Misses Morgan, or Martha Brown, or old Mrs Morgan, or the Indian nurse, (whose name was Ayah, which is Sanscrit or Cherokee for her situation,) any body would do. I was not at all particular; so I began my own description. It is amazing how little difference there is between man and man. A very few touches judiciously applied, would make Roebuck into Wellington, especially if Roebuck held the brush himself. Involuntarily I found my height increasing, my _embonpoint_ diminishing, my eyes brightening, my hair disporting in wavy ringlets over a majestic brow, till at the end of the second page I was Theodore Fitzhedingham, twenty-five years of age, with several grandfathers and grandmothers distinguished in history before the Norman conquest, and a clear rent-roll of forty thousand a-year. And yet, after all, it was my own individual self, Thomas Smith Sneezum--not, perhaps, exactly as I was at that moment--but as I had often and often fancied myself when I had gone through a course of Thaddeus of Warsaws, and other chronicles of the brave and beautiful. For, I confess, I was no wiser than other people, and it is well known they have an amazing tendency to identify themselves with the characters of the books they read, which perhaps accounts for the contempt that Doctors' or Clergymen's wives in country villages entertain for any body of the name of Snookes; and gives them so prodigious an opinion of their own importance, that they wouldn't visit a stockbroker or flannel manufacturer for the world. But there I was, stuck in the third page of the second chapter--Theodore Fitzhedingham--blessed with all that handsomeness, and rolling in all that money, and not able to move hand or foot, or in short make the least progress towards the _denouement_ of the story. For, with all my study, I could not manufacture a heroine out of any of the girls around me. Miss Letitia Morgan had false teeth--I found it quite impossible to make a heroine of _her_; and besides, I was not even sure of the genuineness of the long curls at the side of her face. For, you will observe, that the beautifying process I have mentioned above; seems strictly confined to one's own particular case. No lying and swopping, and altering and amending, would make those long brown artificial incisors--you saw a roll of the gold wire every time