he had at that visit met among
the honoured men who held chairs in their Cambridge University, had been
hanged for the murder, committed in his laboratory in the college, of a
friend who had lent him money, portions of whose body lay concealed
under the lid of the lecture-room table where the murderer continued to
meet his students. "Being in Cambridge," Dickens wrote to Lord Lytton,
"I thought I would go over the Medical School, and see the exact
localities where Professor Webster did that amazing murder, and worked
so hard to rid himself of the body of the murdered man. (I find there is
of course no rational doubt that the Professor was always a secretly
cruel man.) They were horribly grim, private, cold, and quiet; the
identical furnace smelling fearfully (some anatomical broth in it I
suppose) as if the body were still there; jars of pieces of sour
mortality standing about, like the forty robbers in _Ali Baba_ after
being scalded to death; and bodies near us ready to be carried in to
next morning's lecture. At the house where I afterwards dined I heard an
amazing and fearful story; told by one who had been at a dinner-party of
ten or a dozen, at Webster's, less than a year before the murder. They
began rather uncomfortably, in consequence of one of the guests (the
victim of an instinctive antipathy) starting up with the sweat pouring
down his face, and crying out, 'O Heaven! There's a cat somewhere in the
room!' The cat was found and ejected, but they didn't get on very well.
Left with their wine, they were getting on a little better; when Webster
suddenly told the servants to turn the gas off and bring in that bowl of
burning minerals which he had prepared, in order that the company might
see how ghastly they looked by its weird light. All this was done, and
every man was looking, horror-stricken, at his neighbour; when Webster
was seen bending over the bowl with a rope round his neck, holding up
the end of the rope, with his head on one side and his tongue lolled
out, to represent a hanged man!"

Dickens read at Boston on the 23rd and the 24th of December, and on
Christmas day travelled back to New York where he was to read on the
26th. The last words written before he left were of illness. "The low
action of the heart, or whatever it is, has inconvenienced me greatly
this last week. On Monday night, after the reading, I was laid upon a
bed, in a very faint and shady state; and on the Tuesday I did not get
up til