e that his own health was yielding to the
overstrain which had been placed upon it by the occurrences and
anxieties of the few preceding years. His mother, whose infirm health
had been tending for more than two years to the close, died in September
1863; and on his own birthday in the following February he had tidings
of the death of his second son Walter, on the last day of the old year
in the officers' hospital at Calcutta; to which he had been sent up
invalided from his station, on his way home. He was a lieutenant in the
26th Native Infantry regiment, and had been doing duty with the 42nd
Highlanders. In 1853 his father had thus written to the youth's
godfather, Walter Savage Landor: "Walter is a very good boy, and comes
home from school with honorable commendation and a prize into the
bargain. He never gets into trouble, for he is a great favourite with
the whole house and one of the most amiable boys in the boy-world. He
comes out on birthdays in a blaze of shirt pin." The pin was a present
from Landor; to whom three years later, when the boy had obtained his
cadetship through the kindness of Miss Coutts, Dickens wrote again.
"Walter has done extremely well at school; has brought home a prize in
triumph; and will be eligible to 'go up' for his India examination soon
after next Easter. Having a direct appointment he will probably be sent
out soon after he has passed, and so will fall into that strange life
'up the country' before he well knows he is alive, or what life
is--which indeed seems to be rather an advanced state of knowledge." If
he had lived another month he would have reached his twenty-third year,
and perhaps not then the advanced state of knowledge his father speaks
of. But, never forfeiting his claim to those kindly paternal words, he
had the goodness and simplicity of boyhood to the last.

Dickens had at this time begun his last story in twenty numbers, and my
next chapter will show through what unwonted troubles, in this and the
following year, he had to fight his way. What otherwise during its
progress chiefly interested him, was the enterprise of Mr. Fechter at
the Lyceum, of which he had become the lessee; and Dickens was moved to
this quite as much by generous sympathy with the difficulties of such a
position to an artist who was not an Englishman, as by genuine
admiration of Mr. Fechter's acting. He became his helper in disputes,
adviser on literary points, referee in matters of management; and