in the face.
I know perfectly well beforehand how unspeakably wretched I should be.
But these renewed and larger offers tempt me. I can force myself to go
aboard a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading-desk what I
have done a hundred times; but whether, with all this unsettled
fluctuating distress in my mind, I could force an original book out of
it, is another question." On the 22nd, still striving hard to find
reasons to cope with the all but irresistible arguments against any such
adventure, which indeed, with everything that then surrounded him, would
have been little short of madness, he thus stated his experience of his
two circuits of public reading. "Remember that at home here the thing
has never missed fire, but invariably does more the second time than it
did the first; and also that I have got so used to it, and have worked
so hard at it, as to get out of it more than I ever thought was in it
for that purpose. I think all the probabilities for such a country as
Australia are immense." The terrible difficulty was that the home
argument struck both ways. "If I were to go it would be a penance and a
misery, and I dread the thought more than I can possibly express. The
domestic life of the Readings is all but intolerable to me when I am
away for a few weeks at a time merely, and what would it be----." On the
other hand it was also a thought of home, far beyond the mere personal
loss or gain of it, that made him willing still to risk even so much
misery and penance; and he had a fancy that it might be possible to take
his eldest daughter with him. "It is useless and needless for me to say
what the conflict in my own mind is. How painfully unwilling I am to go,
and yet how painfully sensible that perhaps I ought to go--with all the
hands upon my skirts that I cannot fail to feel and see there, whenever
I look round. It is a struggle of no common sort, as you will suppose,
you who know the circumstances of the struggler." It closed at once when
he clearly saw that to take any of his family with him, and make
satisfactory arrangement for the rest during such an absence, would be
impossible. By this time also he began to find his way to the new story,
and better hopes and spirits had returned.

In January 1863 he had taken his daughter and his sister-in-law to
Paris, and he read twice at the Embassy in behalf of the British
Charitable Fund, the success being such that he consented to read twice
again.[24