; but there was
just at this time no cause for special fear, when unexpected convulsions
came, and the frail little life passed away. My decision had to be
formed at once; and I satisfied myself that it would be best to permit
his part of the proceedings to close before the truth was told to him.
But as he went on, after the sentences I have quoted, to speak of actors
having to come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, aye, even of death
itself, to play their parts before us, my part was very difficult. "Yet
how often is it with all of us," he proceeded to say, and I remember to
this hour with what anguish I listened to words that had for myself
alone, in all the crowded room, their full significance: "how often is
it with all of us, that in our several spheres we have to do violence to
our feelings, and to hide our hearts in carrying on this fight of life,
if we would bravely discharge in it our duties and responsibilities." In
the disclosure that followed when he left the chair, Mr. Lemon, who was
present, assisted me; and I left this good friend with him next day,
when I went myself to Malvern and brought back Mrs. Dickens and her
sister. The little child lies in a grave at Highgate near that of Mr.
and Mrs. John Dickens; and on the stone which covers her is now written
also her father's name, and those of two of her brothers.

One more public discussion he took part in, before quitting London for
the rest of the summer; and what he said (it was a meeting, with Lord
Carlisle in the chair, in aid of Sanitary reform) very pregnantly
illustrates what was remarked by me on a former page. He declared his
belief that neither education nor religion could do anything really
useful in social improvement until the way had been paved for their
ministrations by cleanliness and decency. He spoke warmly of the
services of Lord Ashley in connection with ragged schools, but he put
the case of a miserable child tempted into one of those schools out of
the noisome places in which his life was passed, and he asked what a few
hours' teaching could effect against the ever-renewed lesson of a whole
existence. "But give him, and his, a glimpse of heaven through a little
of its light and air; give them water; help them to be clean; lighten
the heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag, and which makes them
the callous things they are; take the body of the dead relative from the
room where the living live with it, and where such loathsom