Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you marry that woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"-- "The worst book anybody ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I ever saw"--A great deal of the feminine in Reade--Fire, pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A philosophical library in itself--Amusing appanage of his own book--Oily and voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the os-rotundus sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word of it true; but--"--Better, or happier, because we had lived-- Appropriated somebody else's adventure--Filtering remarks through the mind of a third person--A delightful Irishman-- Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate opinion--The whole line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody would invent a new sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well dressed-- Indomitable figure, aggressively American--Too much of the elixir of life--A little strangeness between us--Sunshine will always rest on it. The central event of 1856 was the return from Lisbon and Madeira of my mother and sisters. Measuring time, as boys do (very sensibly), not by the regulated pace of minutes, but by the vast spaces covered by desire, it appeared to me, for some decades, that they had been absent in those regions for years--two years at least; and I was astonished and almost incredulous when dates seemed to prove that the interval had been six or eight months only. It was long enough.