The Second Meeting of Mudfog

FULL REPORT OF THE SECOND MEETING OF THE MUDFOG ASSOCIATION FOR THE
ADVANCEMENT OF EVERYTHING

In October last, we did ourselves the immortal credit of recording,
at an enormous expense, and by dint of exertions unnpralleled in
the history of periodical publication, the proceedings of the
Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything, which in that
month held its first great half-yearly meeting, to the wonder and
delight of the whole empire. We announced at the conclusion of
that extraordinary and most remarkable Report, that when the Second
Meeting of the Society should take place, we should be found again
at our post, renewing our gigantic and spirited endeavours, and
once more making the world ring with the accuracy, authenticity,
immeasurable superiority, and intense remarkability of our account
of its proceedings. In redemption of this pledge, we caused to be
despatched per steam to Oldcastle (at which place this second
meeting of the Society was held on the 20th instant), the same
superhumanly-endowed gentleman who furnished the former report, and
who,--gifted by nature with transcendent abilities, and furnished
by us with a body of assistants scarcely inferior to himself,--has
forwarded a series of letters, which, for faithfulness of
description, power of language, fervour of thought, happiness of
expression, and importance of subject-matter, have no equal in the
epistolary literature of any age or country. We give this
gentleman's correspondence entire, and in the order in which it
reached our office.

'Saloon of Steamer, Thursday night, half-past eight.

'When I left New Burlington Street this evening in the hackney
cabriolet, number four thousand two hundred and eighty-five, I
experienced sensations as novel as they were oppressive. A sense
of the importance of the task I had undertaken, a consciousness
that I was leaving London, and, stranger still, going somewhere
else, a feeling of loneliness and a sensation of jolting, quite
bewildered my thoughts, and for a time rendered me even insensible
to the presence of my carpet-bag and hat-box. I shall ever feel
grateful to the driver of a Blackwall omnibus who, by thrusting the
pole of his vehicle through the small door of the cabriolet,
awakened me from a tumult of imaginings that are wholly
indescribable. But of such materials is our imperfect nature
composed!

'I am happy to say that I am the first passenger on board, and
shall thus be enabled to give you an account of all that happens in
the order of its occurrence. The chimney is smoking a good deal,
and so are the crew; and the captain, I am informed, is very drunk
in a little house upon deck, something like a black turnpike. I
should infer from all I