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.
What fractional elements, capable of gaining some vestige of
meaning when laid together in their cosmic order, I could pick
from the circumambient immensity not cosmic, are here for the
reader's behoof. Let him skip, if, like myself, he is weary;
for the substance of the story is elsewhere given. Or perhaps he
has the curiosity to know the speech of birds? With abridgment, by
occasional change of phrase, above all by immense omission,--here,
in specimen, is something like what the Rookery says to poor
Friedrich Wilhelm and us, through St. Mary Axe and the Copyists in
the Foreign Office! Friedrich Wilhelm reads it (Hotham gives him
reading of it) some weeks hence; we not till generations