[241] "You will be grieved," he wrote (Saturday 19th of Nov. 1859) "to
hear of poor Stone. On Sunday he was not well. On Monday, went to Dr.
Todd, who told him he had aneurism of the heart. On Tuesday, went to Dr.
Walsh, who told him he hadn't. On Wednesday I met him in a cab in the
Square here, and he got out to talk to me. I walked about with him a
little while at a snail's pace, cheering him up; but when I came home, I
told them that I thought him much changed, and in danger. Yesterday at 2
o'clock he died of spasm of the heart. I am going up to Highgate to look
for a grave for him."

[242] He was now hard at work on his story; and a note written from
Gadshill after the funeral shows, what so frequently was incident to his
pursuits, the hard conditions under which sorrow, and its claim on his
exertion, often came to him. "To-morrow I have to work against time and
tide and everything else, to fill up a No. keeping open for me, and the
stereotype plates of which must go to America on Friday. But indeed the
enquiry into poor Alfred's affairs; the necessity of putting the widow
and children somewhere; the difficulty of knowing what to do for the
best; and the need I feel under of being as composed and deliberate as I
can be, and yet of not shirking or putting off the occasion that there
is for doing a duty; would have brought me back here to be quiet, under
any circumstances."

[243] The same letter adds: "The fourth edition of _Great Expectations_
is now going to press; the third being nearly out. Bulwer's story keeps
us up bravely. As well as we can make out, we have even risen fifteen
hundred."

[244] "There was a very touching thing in the Chapel" (at Brompton).
"When the body was to be taken up and carried to the grave, there
stepped out, instead of the undertaker's men with their hideous
paraphernalia, the men who had always been with the two brothers at the
Egyptian Hall; and they, in their plain, decent, own mourning clothes,
carried the poor fellow away. Also, standing about among the
gravestones, dressed in black, I noticed every kind of person who had
ever had to do with him--from our own gas man and doorkeepers and
billstickers, up to Johnson the printer and that class of man. The
father and Albert and he now lie together, and the grave, I suppose,
will be no more disturbed I wrote a little inscription for the stone,
and it is quite full."

[245] Of his former manager he writes in the same letter: "I