place in _All the Year Round_ with the
"Strange Story;" and he then indulged himself in idleness for a little
while. "The subsidence of those distressing pains in my face the moment
I had done my work, made me resolve to do nothing in that way for some
time if I could help it."[243] But his "doing nothing" was seldom more
than a figure of speech, and what it meant in this case was soon told.
"Every day for two or three hours, I practise my new readings, and
(except in my office work) do nothing else. With great pains I have made
a continuous narrative out of _Copperfield_, that I think will reward
the exertion it is likely to cost me. Unless I am much mistaken, it will
be very valuable in London. I have also done _Nicholas Nickleby_ at the
Yorkshire school, and hope I have got something droll out of Squeers,
John Browdie, & Co. Also, the Bastille prisoner from the _Tale of Two
Cities_. Also, the Dwarf from one of our Christmas numbers." Only the
first two were added to the list for the present circuit.

It was in the midst of these active preparations that painful news
reached him. An illness under which Mr. Arthur Smith had been some time
suffering took unexpectedly a dangerous turn, and there came to be but
small chance of his recovery. A distressing interview on the 28th of
September gave Dickens little hope. "And yet his wakings and wanderings
so perpetually turn on his arrangements for the Readings, and he is so
desperately unwilling to relinquish the idea of 'going on with the
business' to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, that I had not the
heart to press him for the papers. He told me that he believed he had by
him '70 or 80 letters unanswered.' You may imagine how anxious it makes
me, and at what a deadstop I stand." Another week passed, and with it
the time fixed at the places where his work was to have opened; but he
could not bring himself to act as if all hope had gone. "With a sick man
who has been so zealous and faithful, I feel bound to be very tender and
patient. When I told him the other day about my having engaged
Headland--'to do all the personally bustling and fatiguing part of your
work,' I said--he nodded his heavy head with great satisfaction, and
faintly got out of himself the words, 'Of course I pay him, and not
you.'" The poor fellow died in October; and on the day after attending
the funeral,[244] Dickens heard of the death of his brother-in-law and
friend, Mr. Henry Austin, whose abilities