nto a damaged
state. But the moment I got away, I began, thank God, to get well. I
hope to profit by this experience, and to make future dashes from my
desk before I want them." At his return he was in the terrible railway
accident at Staplehurst, on a day[256] which proved afterwards more
fatal to him; and it was with shaken nerves but unsubdued energy he
resumed the labour to be presently described. His foot troubled him more
or less throughout the autumn;[257] he was beset by nervous
apprehensions which the accident had caused to himself, not lessened by
his generous anxiety to assuage the severer sufferings inflicted by it
on others;[258] and that he should nevertheless have determined, on the
close of his book, to undertake a series of readings involving greater
strain and fatigue than any hitherto, was a startling circumstance. He
had perhaps become conscious, without owning it even to himself, that
for exertion of this kind the time left him was short; but, whatever
pressed him on, his task of the next three years, self-imposed, was to
make the most money in the shortest time without any regard to the
physical labour to be undergone. The very letter announcing his new
engagement shows how entirely unfit he was to enter upon it.

"For some time," he wrote at the end of February 1866, "I have been very
unwell. F. B. wrote me word that with such a pulse as I described, an
examination of the heart was absolutely necessary. 'Want of muscular
power in the heart,' B said. 'Only remarkable irritability of the
heart,' said Doctor Brinton of Brook-street, who had been called in to
consultation. I was not disconcerted; for I knew well beforehand that
the effect could not possibly be without the one cause at the bottom of
it, of some degeneration of some function of the heart. Of course I am
not so foolish as to suppose that all my work can have been achieved
without _some_ penalty, and I have noticed for some time a decided
change in my buoyancy and hopefulness--in other words, in my usual
'tone.' But tonics have already brought me round. So I have accepted an
offer, from Chappells of Bond-street, of L50 a night for thirty nights
to read 'in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Paris;' they undertaking all
the business, paying all personal expenses, travelling and otherwise, of
myself, John" (his office servant), "and my gasman; and making what they
can of it. I begin, I believe, in Liverpool on the Thursday in Easter
week, and t