LIKE Scott, Dickens preferred the long story to the short. He unrolled the panorama of life as he saw it, with its contrasts of broad humor and of pathetic sentiment. Although he took great pains with the plots of his novels, they are ill-shaped for the most part, sprawling and invertebrate. He had not the power of building a story boldly yet simply. The brief tales which he inserted in the early “Pickwick Papers” lack distinction; and the short-stories written long after are often marred by the hard artificiality which characterized much of his later work. But this little tale, written in 1850 on a sudden impulse, is simple and unpretending; and it gains its beauty from this unpretentious simplicity.