this country) and was very miserable. . . . It is a bad country to be
unwell and travelling in. You are one of, say, a hundred people in a
heated car with a great stove in it, all the little windows being
closed; and the bumping and banging about are indescribable, the
atmosphere detestable, the ordinary motion all but intolerable." The
following day this addition was made to the letter. "I managed to read
last night, but it was as much as I could do. To-day I am so very unwell
that I have sent for a doctor. He has just been, and is in doubt whether
I shall not have to stop reading for a while."

His stronger will prevailed, and he went on without stopping. On the
last day of the year he announced to us that though he had been very low
he was getting right again; that in a couple of days he should have
accomplished a fourth of the entire Readings; and that the first month
of the new year would see him through Philadelphia and Baltimore, as
well as through two more nights in Boston. He also prepared his English
friends for the startling intelligence they might shortly expect, of
four readings coming off in a church, before an audience of two thousand
people accommodated in pews, and with himself emerging from a vestry.

FOOTNOTES:

[275] Among these I think he was most delighted with the great
naturalist and philosopher, Agassiz, whose death is unhappily announced
while I write, and as to whom it will no longer be unbecoming to quote
his allusion. "Agassiz, who married the last Mrs. Felton's sister, is
not only one of the most accomplished but the most natural and jovial of
men." Again he says: "I cannot tell you how pleased I was by Agassiz, a
most charming fellow, or how I have regretted his seclusion for a while
by reason of his mother's death." A valued correspondent, Mr. Grant
Wilson, sends me a list of famous Americans who greeted Dickens at his
first visit, and in the interval had passed away. "It is melancholy to
contemplate the large number of American authors who had, between the
first and second visits of Mr. Dickens, 'gone hence, to be no more
seen.' The sturdy Cooper, the gentle Irving, his friend and kinsman
Paulding, Prescott the historian and Percival the poet, the eloquent
Everett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar A. Poe, N. P. Willis, the genial
Halleck, and many lesser lights, including Prof. Felton and Geo. P.
Morris, had died during the quarter of a century that elapsed between
Dickens's visits to this c