one of these readings was a tale (by Mr. Wilkie Collins) from the
last Christmas Number of this Journal, entitled "Picking up Waifs at
Sea". It appears that the Eye gentility was shocked by the
introduction of this rude piece among the taste and musical glasses
of that important town, on which the eyes of Europe are notoriously
always fixed. In particular, the feelings of the vicar's family
were outraged; and a Local Organ (say, the Tattlesnivel Bleater)
consequently doomed the said piece to everlasting oblivion, as being
of an "injurious tendency!"

When this fearful fact came to the knowledge of the unhappy writer
of the doomed tale in question, he covered his face with his robe,
previous to dying decently under the sharp steel of the
ecclesiastical gentility of the terrible town of Eye. But the
discovery that he was not alone in his gloomy glory, revived him,
and he still lives.

For, at Stowmarket, in the aforesaid county of Suffolk, at another
of those penny readings, it was announced that a certain juvenile
sketch, culled from a volume of sketches (by Boz) and entitled "The
Bloomsbury Christening", would be read. Hereupon, the clergyman of
that place took heart and pen, and addressed the following terrific
epistle to a gentleman bearing the very appropriate name of Gudgeon:


STOWMARKET VICARAGE, Feb. 25, 1861.

SIR,--My attention has been directed to a piece called "The
Bloomsbury Christening" which you propose to read this evening.
Without presuming to claim any interference in the arrangement of