It remains still a matter of surprise how so much was made out of this slight sketch by the simple force of its humorous delivery. “Mr. Chops, the Dwarf,” as, indeed, was only befitting, was the smallest of all the Readings. The simple little air that so caught the dreamer's fancy, when played upon the harp by Scrooge's niece by marriage, is described after all, as may be remembered by the readers of the Carol, to to have been intrinsically “a mere nothing; you might learn to whistle it in two minutes.” Say that in twenty minutes, or, at the outside, in half-an-hour, any ordinarily glib talker might have rattled through these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject was anything but attractive, relating, as it did, merely to the escapade of a monstrosity. The surroundings are ignoble, the language is illiterate, the narrative from first to last is characterised by its grotesque extravagance. Yet the whole is presented to view in so utterly ludicrous an aspect, that one needs must laugh just as surely as one listened. Turning over the leaves now, and recalling to mind the hilarity they used to excite even among the least impressionable audience whenever they were fluttered (there are not a dozen of them altogether) on the familiar reading-desk, one marvels over the success of such an exceedingly small oddity as over the remembrance, let us say, of the brilliant performance of a fantasia on the jew's-harp by Rubenstein.

Nevertheless, slight though it is, the limning all through has touches of the most comic suggestiveness. Magsman's account of the show-house during his occupancy is sufficiently absurd to begin with—“the picter of the giant who was himself the heighth of the house,” being run up with a line and pulley to a pole on the roof till “his 'ed was coeval with the parapet;” the picter of the child of the British Planter seized by two Boa Constrictors, “not that we never had no child, nor no Constrictors either;” similarly, the picter of the Wild Ass of the Prairies, “not that we never had no wild asses, nor wouldn't have had 'em at a gift.” And to crown all, the picter of the Dwarf—who was “a uncommon small man, he really was. Certainly not so small as he was made out to be; but where is your Dwarf as is?” A picter “like him, too considering, with George the Fourth, in such a state of astonishment at him as his Majesty couldn't with his utmost politeness and stoutness express.” Wrote up the Dwarf was, we are told by Mr. Magsman, as Major Tpschoffski—“nobody couldn't pronounce the name,” he adds, “and it never was intended anybody should.” Corrupted into Chopski by the public, he gets called in the line Chops, partly for that reason, “partly because his real name, if he ever had any real name (which was dubious), was Stakes.” Wearing a diamond ring “(or quite as good to look at)” on his forefinger, having the run of his teeth, “and he was a Woodpecker to eat—but all dwarfs are,” receiving a good salary, and gathering besides as his perquisites the ha'pence collected by him in a Chaney sarser at the end of every entertainment, the Dwarf never has any money somehow. Nevertheless, having what his admiring proprietor considers “a fine mind, a poetic mind,” Mr. Chops indulges himself in the pleasing delusion that one of these days he is to Come Into his Property, his ideas respecting which are never realised by him so powerfully as when he sits upon a barrel-organ and has the handle turned! “Arter the wibration has run through him a little time,” says Mr. Magsman, “he screeches out, 'Toby, I feel my property a-coming—gr-r-rind away! I feel the Mint a-jingling in me. I'm a-swelling out into the Bank of England!' Such,” reflectively observes his proprietor, “is the influence of music on a poetic mind!” Adding, however, immediately afterwards, “Not that he was partial to any other music but a barrel-organ; on the contrairy, hated it.” Indulging in day-dreams about Coming Into his Property and Going Into Society, for which he feels himself formed, and to aspire towards which is his avowed ambition, the mystery, as to where the Dwarf's salary and ha'pence all go, is one day cleared up by his winning a prize in the Lottery, a half-ticket for the twenty-five thousand pounder.

Mr. Chops Comes Into his Property—twelve thousand odd hundred. Further than that, he Goes Into Society “in a chay and four greys with silk jackets.” It was at this turning-point in the career of his large-headed but diminutive hero that the grotesque humour of the Reader would play upon the risible nerves of his hearers, as, according to Mr. Disraeli's phrase, Sir Robert Peel used to play upon the House of Commons, “like an old fiddle.” Determined to Go Into Society in style, with his twelve thousand odd hundred, Mr. Chops, we are told, “sent for a young man he knowed, as had a very genteel appearance, and was a Bonnet at a gaming-booth. Most respectable brought up,” adds Mr. Magsman—“father having been imminent in the livery-stable line, but unfortunate in a commercial crisis through painting a old grey ginger-bay, and sellin' him with a pedigree.” In intimate companionship with this Bonnet, “who said his name was Normandy, which it warn't,” Mr. Magsman, on invitation by note a little while afterwards, visits Mr. Chops at his lodgings in Pall Mall, London, where he is found carousing not only with the Bonnet but with a third party, of whom we were then told with unconscionable gravity, “When last met, he had on a white Roman shirt, and a bishop's mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played the clarionet all wrong in a band at a Wild Beast Show.” How the reverential Magsman, finding the three of them blazing away, blazes away in his turn while remaining in their company, who, that once heard it, has forgotten? “I made the round of the bottles,” he says—evidently proud of his achievement—“first separate (to say I had done it), and then mixed 'em altogether (to say I had done it), and then tried two of 'em as half-and-half, and then t'other two; altogether,” he adds, “passin' a pleasin' evenin' with a tendency to feel muddled.” How all Mr. Chop's blazing away is to terminate everybody but himself perceives clearly enough from the commencement.

Normandy having bolted with the plate, and “him as formerly wore the bishop's mitre” with the jewels, the Dwarf gets out of society by being, as he significantly expresses it, “sold out,” and in this plight returns penitently one evening to the show-house of his still-admiring proprietor. Mr. Magsman happens at the moment to be having a dull tÊte-À-tÊte with a young man without arms, who gets his living by writing with his toes, “which,” says the low-spirited narrator, “I had taken on for a month—though he never drawed—except on paper.” Hearing a kicking at the street-door, “'Halloa!' I says to the young man, 'what's up?' He rubs his eyebrows with his toes, and he says, 'I can't imagine, Mr. Magsman'—which that young man [with an air of disgust] never could imagine nothin', and was monotonous company.” Mr. Chops—“I never dropped the 'Mr.' with him,” says his again proprietor; “the world might do it, but not me”—eventually dies. Having sat upon the barrel-organ over night, and had the handle turned through all the changes, for the first and only time after his fall, Mr. Chops is found on the following morning, as the disconsolate Magsman expresses it, “gone into much better society than either mine or Pall Mall's.” Out of such unpromising materials as these could the alembic of a genius all-embracing in its sympathies extract such an abundance of innocent mirth—an illiterate showman talking to us all the while about such people as the Bonnet of a gaming-booth, or a set of monstrosities he himself has, for a few coppers, on exhibition. Yet, as Mr. Magsman himself remarks rather proudly when commenting on his own establishment, “as for respectability,—if threepence ain't respectable, what is?”