The many friends it has won me, and the many hearts it has
turned to me when they were full of private sorrow, invest it
with an interest, in my mind, which is not a public one, and
the rightful place of which appears to be "a more removed
ground."

I will merely observe, therefore, that, in writing the book,
I had it always in my fancy to surround the lonely figure of
the child with grotesque and wild, but not impossible com-
panions, and to gather about her innocent face and pure inten-
tions, associates as strange and uncongenial as the grim objects
that are about her bed when her history is first fore-shadowed.

MASTER HUMPHREY (before his devotion to the trunk and
butter business) was originally supposed to be the narrator of
the story. As it was constructed from the beginning, however,
with a view to separate publication when completed, his demise
has not involved the necessity of any alteration.

I have a mournful pride in one recollection associated with
"little Nell." While she was yet upon her wanderings, not
then concluded, there appeared in a literary journal, an essay
of which she was the principal theme, so earnestly, so elo-
quently, and tenderly appreciative of her, and of all her shadowy
kith and kin, that it would have been insensibility in me, if I
could have read it without an unusual glow of pleasure and
encouragement. Long afterwards, and when I had come to
know him well, and to see him, stout of heart, going slowly
down into his grave, I knew the writer of that essay to be
THOMAS HOOD.

LONDON, September, 1848.

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