"Bring me my books!" said the Baron, not for the first time. But on this occasion the Baron was a prisoner in bed, and likely to remain so for many days. Consequently, he required amusement. He had heard of a book, called _Three Men in a Boat_, by Mr. JEROME K. JEROME, some of whose observations, in a collection of papers entitled _Stage-land_, had caused him to laugh several times, and to smile frequently, for the subject has not been so well touched since GILBERT ABBOTT A BECKETT wrote his inimitable _Quizziology of the Drama_, which for genuine drollery has never been surpassed. Anticipating, then, some side-splitters from _Three Men in a Boat_, the Baron sent for the work. He opened it with a chuckle, which, instead of developing itself into a guffaw and then into a fit of uncontrollable laughter, gradually subsided altogether, his smile vanished, and an expression of weariness came over the Baron's face, as after heroically plodding through five chapters he laid the book down, and sighed aloud, "Well, I'm hanged if I see where the fun of this is." The Baron may be wrong, and the humour of this book, which seems to him to consist in weak imitations of American fun, and in conversations garnished with such phrases as "bally idiot," "bally tent," "doing a mouch," "boss the job," "put a pipe in his mouth, and spread himself over a chair," "land him with a frying-pan," "fat-headed chunk," "who the thunder" and so forth--a style the Baron believes to have been introduced from Yankee-land, and patented here by the _Sporting Times_ and its imitators,--interspersed with plentiful allusions to whiskey-drinking, may not be, as it is not, to his particular taste; and yet, for all that, it may be marvellously funny. So the Baron requested an admirer of this book to pick out the gems, and read them aloud to him. But even the admirer was compelled to own that the gems did not sparkle so brilliantly as he had at first thought. "Yet," observed the admirer, "it has had a big sale." "_Three Men in a Boat_ ought to have," quoth the Baron, cheerily, and then he called aloud, "Bring me _Pickwick_!" He commenced at the Review, and the first meeting of _Mr. Pickwick_ with the Wardle family. Within five minutes the Baron was shaking with spasmodic laughter, and CHARLES DICKENS'S drollery was as irresistible as ever. Of course the Baron does not for one moment mean to be so unfair to the _Three Men in a Boat_ as to institute a comparison between it and the immortal _Pickwick_, but he has heard some young gentlemen, quite of the modern school, who profess themselves intensely amused by such works as this, and as the two books by the author of _Through Green Glasses_, and yet allow that they could not find anything to laugh at in _Pickwick_. They did not object to _Pickwick_, as ladies very often do, that there is so much eating and drinking in it. "No," says the Baron, in bed, "Give me my _Pickwick_, and, after him, for a soothing and pleasant companion, give me