stay two more if people will let us alone; but they persecute us from village to village," Lamb writes to Bernard Barton in August.
At the end of that time they decided to return to Colebrook Cottage no more, but to take a house at Enfield. The actual process of taking it was witnessed by a spectator, a perfect stranger at the time, on whose memory it left a lively picture. "Leaning idly out of a window, I saw a group of three issuing from the 'gambogy-looking' cottage close at hand,—a slim, middle-aged man, in quaint, uncontemporary habiliments, a rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in a bonnet like a mob cap, and a young girl; while before them bounded a riotous dog (Hood's immortal 'Dash'), holding a board with 'This House to Let' on it in his jaws. Lamb was on his way back to the house-agent, and that was his fashion of announcing that he had taken the premises.
"I soon grew to be on intimate terms with my neighbours," continues the writer of this pleasant reminiscence—Mr. Westwood,in Notes and Queries, vol. x. "who let me loose in his library. . . . My heart yearns even now to those old books. Their faces seem all familiar to me, even their patches and blotches—the work of a wizened old cobbler hard by—for little wotted Lamb of Roger Parkes and Charles Lewises. A cobbler was his book-binder, and the rougher the restoration the better. . . . When any notable visitors made their appearance at the cottage, Mary Lamb's benevolent tap at my window-pane seldom failed to summon me out, and I was presently ensconced in a quiet corner of their sitting-room, half hid in some great man's shadow.
"Of the discourse of these dii majores I have no
