Good part of it still lies in the Paper-Office here; [Prussian Despatches, vols.xl.

xli.: in a fragmentary state; so much of it as they had caught up, and tried to make use of;--far too much.] likely to be published by the Prussian Dryasdust in coming time: but a more sordid mass of eavesdroppings, kitchen-ashes and floor-sweepings, collected and interchanged by a pair of treacherous Flunkies (big bullying Flunky and little trembling cringing one, Grumkow and Reichenbach), was never got together out of a gentleman's household.
To no idlest reader, armed even with barnacles, and holding mouth and nose, can the stirring-up of such a dust-bin be long tolerable.

But the amazing problem was this Editor's, doomed to spell the Event into clearness if he could, and put dates, physiognomy and outline to it, by help of such Flunky-Sanscrit!--That Nosti-Grumkow Correspondence, as we now have it in the Paper-Office,--interpretable only by acres of British Despatches, by incondite dateless helpless Prussian Books ("printed Blotches of Human Stupor," as Smelfungus calls them): how gladly would one return them all to St.Mary Axe, there to lie through Eternity! It is like holding dialogue with a rookery; asking your way (perhaps in flight for life, as was partly my own case) by colloquy with successive or even simultaneous Rookeries.

Reader, have you tried such a thing?
An adventure, never to be spoken of again, when once DONE! Wilhelmina pretends to give quotations [Wilhelmina, i.

233-235.] from this subterranean Grumkow-Reichenbach Correspondence; but hers are only extracts from some description or remembrance; hardly one word is close to the original, though here and there some outline or shadow of a real passage is traceable.