Page:The Ingoldsby Legends (Frowde, 1905).pdf/61

 pencil, and to transmit my features to posterity, where all his works are sure to be 'delivered according to the direction;' but somehow the noble-looking profiles which he has recently executed of the Kemble family put me a little out of conceit of my own, while the undisguised amusement which my ' Mephistopheles Eyebrow,' as he termed it, afforded him, in the ' full face,' induced me to lay aside the design. Besides, my dear Sir, since, as has well been observed, ' there never was a married man yet who had not somebody remarkably like him walking about town,' it is a thousand to one but my lineaments might, after all, out of sheer perverseness be ascribed to any body rather than to the real owner. I have therefore sent you, instead thereof, a fair sketch of Tappington, taken from the Folkestane road (I tore it last night out of Julia Simpkinson's album); get Gilks to make a woodcut of it. And now, if any miscreant (I use the word only in its primary and ' Pickwickian' sense of "unbeliever') ventures to throw any further doubt upon the matter, why, as Jack Cade's friend says in the play, ' There are the chimneys in my father's house, and the bricks are alive at this day to testify it!'

Heaven be with you, my dear Sir!—I was getting a little excited; but you, who are mild as the milk that dews the soft whisker of the new-weaned kitten, will forgive me when, wiping away the nascent moisture subscribe myself, from my brow, I 'pull in,' and subscribe myself,

Yours quite as much as his own, THOMAS INGOLDSBY