host. Every
one has profited by it, and the labouring people in especial are
thoroughly well cared-for and looked after. To see all the household,
headed by an enormously fat housekeeper, occupying the back benches last
night, laughing and applauding without any restraint; and to see a
blushing sleek-headed footman produce, for the watch-trick, a silver
watch of the most portentous dimensions, amidst the rapturous delight of
his brethren and sisterhood; was a very pleasant spectacle, even to a
conscientious republican like yourself or me, who cannot but contemplate
the parent country with feelings of pride in our own land, which (as was
well observed by the Honorable Elias Deeze, of Hertford, Conn.) is truly
the land of the free. Best remembrances from Columbia's daughters. Ever
thine, my dear F,--C.H." Dickens, during the too brief time this
excellent friend was spared to him, often repeated his visits to
Rockingham, always a surpassing enjoyment; and in the winter of 1851 he
accomplished there, with help of the country carpenter, "a very elegant
little theatre," of which he constituted himself manager, and had among
his actors a brother of the lady referred to in his letter, "a very good
comic actor, but loose in words;" poor Augustus Stafford "more than
passable;" and "a son of Vernon Smith's, really a capital low comedian."
It will be one more added to the many examples I have given of his
untiring energy both in work and play, if I mention the fact that this
theatre was opened at Rockingham for their first representation on
Wednesday the 15th of January; that after the performance there was a
country dance which lasted far into the morning; and that on the next
evening, after a railway journey of more than 120 miles, he dined in
London with the prime minister, Lord John Russell.

A little earlier in that winter we had together taken his eldest son to
Eton, and a little later he had a great sorrow. "Poor dear Jeffrey!" he
wrote to me on the 29th January, 1850. "I bought a _Times_ at the
station yesterday morning, and was so stunned by the announcement, that
I felt it in that wounded part of me, almost directly; and the bad
symptoms (modified) returned within a few hours. I had a letter from him
in extraordinary good spirits within this week or two--he was better, he
said, than he had been for a long time--and I sent him proof-sheets of
the number only last Wednesday. I say nothing of his wonderful abilities
and gre