. . . "About four
pounds of powder and half a ton of shot have been (13th of July) fired
off at the cat (and the public in general) during the week. The finest
thing is that immediately after I have heard the noble sportsman blazing
away at her in the garden in front, I look out of my room door into the
drawing-room, and am pretty sure to see her coming in after the birds,
in the calmest manner, by the back window. Intelligence has been brought
to me from a source on which I can rely, that French has newly conceived
the atrocious project of tempting her into the coach-house by meat and
kindness, and there, from an elevated portmanteau, blowing her head off.
This I mean sternly to interdict, and to do so to-day as a work of
piety."

Besides the graver work which Mr. Wilkie Collins and himself were busy
with, in these months, and by which _Household Words_ mainly was to
profit, some lighter matters occupied the leisure of both. There were
to be, at Christmas, theatricals again at Tavistock House; in which the
children, with the help of their father and other friends, were to
follow up the success of the _Lighthouse_ by again acquitting themselves
as grown-up actors; and Mr. Collins was busy preparing for them a new
drama to be called _The Frozen Deep_, while Dickens was sketching a
farce for Mr. Lemon to fill in. But this pleasant employment had sudden
and sad interruption.

An epidemic broke out in the town, affecting the children of several
families known to Dickens, among them that of his friend Mr. Gilbert
A'Becket; who, upon arriving from Paris, and finding a favourite little
son stricken dangerously, sank himself under an illness from which he
had been suffering, and died two days after the boy. "He had for three
days shown symptoms of rallying, and we had some hope of his recovery;
but he sank and died, and never even knew that the child had gone before
him. A sad, sad story." Dickens meanwhile had sent his own children home
with his wife, and the rest soon followed. Poor M. Beaucourt was
inconsolable. "The desolation of the place is wretched. When Mamey and
Katey went, Beaucourt came in and wept. He really is almost
broken-hearted about it. He had planted all manner of flowers for next
month, and has thrown down the spade and left off weeding the garden, so
that it looks something like a dreary bird-cage with all manner of
grasses and chickweeds sticking through the bars and lying in the sand.
'Such a loss too,'