some inward
satisfaction. I never saw a more tremendous thing in its way, in my
life, than when they stood her, t'other day, in the centre of a group of
blind children who sang a chorus to the piano; and brought her hand, and
kept it, in contact with the instrument. A shudder pervaded her whole
being, her breath quickened, her colour deepened,--and I can compare it
to nothing but returning animation in a person nearly dead. It was
really awful to see how the sensation of the music fluttered and stirred
the locked-up soul within her." The same letter spoke again of the
youth: "The male subject is well and jolly as possible. He is very fond
of smoking. I have arranged to supply him with cigars during our stay
here; so he and I are in amazing sympathy. I don't know whether he
thinks I grow them, or make them, or produce them by winking, or what.
But it gives him a notion that the world in general belongs to me.". . .
Before his kind friend left Lausanne the poor fellow had been taught to
say, "Monsieur Dickens m'a donne les cigares," and at their leave-taking
his gratitude was expressed by incessant repetition of these words for a
full half-hour.

Certainly by no man was gratitude more persistently earned, than by
Dickens, from all to whom nature or the world had been churlish or
unfair. Not to those only made desolate by poverty or the temptations
incident to it, but to those whom natural defects or infirmities had
placed at a disadvantage with their kind, he gave his first
consideration; helping them personally where he could, sympathising and
sorrowing with them always, but above all applying himself to the
investigation of such alleviation or cure as philosophy or science might
be able to apply to their condition. This was a desire so eager as
properly to be called one of the passions of his life, visible in him to
the last hour of it.

Only a couple of weeks, themselves not idle ones, had passed over him at
Rosemont when he made a dash at the beginning of his real work; from
which indeed he had only been detained so long by the non-arrival of a
box dispatched from London before his own departure, containing not his
proper writing materials only, but certain quaint little bronze figures
that thus early stood upon his desk, and were as much needed for the
easy flow of his writing as blue ink or quill pens. "I have not been
idle" (28th of June) "since I have been here, though at first I was
'kept out' of the big box as