my
position the whole way. The railway authorities had done all sorts of
things, and I was more comfortable than on the sofa at the hotel. The
foot gave me no uneasiness, and has been quiet and steady all
night."[282] He was nevertheless under the necessity, two days later, of
consulting Mr. Syme; and he told his daughter that this great authority
had warned him against over-fatigue in the readings, and given him some
slight remedies, but otherwise reported him in "joost pairfactly
splendid condition." With care he thought the pain might be got rid of.
"'Wa'at mad' Thompson think it was goot?' he said often, and seemed to
take that opinion extremely ill." Again before leaving Scotland he saw
Mr. Syme, and wrote to me on the second of March of the indignation with
which he again treated the gout diagnosis, declaring the disorder to be
an affection of the delicate nerves and muscles originating in cold. "I
told him that it had shewn itself in America in the other foot as well.
'Noo I'll joost swear,' said he, 'that ayond the fatigue o' the readings
ye'd been tramping i' th' snaw, within twa or three days.' I certainly
had. 'Wa'al,' said he triumphantly, 'and hoo did it first begin? I' th'
snaw. Goot! Bah!--Thompson knew no other name for it, and just ca'd it
Goot--Boh!' For which he took two guineas." Yet the famous pupil, Sir
Henry Thompson, went certainly nearer the mark than the distinguished
master, Mr. Syme, in giving to it a more than local character.

The whole of that March month he went on with the scenes from _Oliver
Twist_. "The foot goes famously," he wrote to his daughter. "I feel the
fatigue in it (four Murders in one week[283]) but not overmuch. It
merely aches at night; and so does the other, sympathetically I
suppose." At Hull on the 8th he heard of the death of the old and dear
friend, Emerson Tennent, to whom he had inscribed his last book; and on
the morning of the 12th I met him at the funeral. He had read the
_Oliver Twist_ scenes the night before at York; had just been able to
get to the express train, after shortening the pauses in the reading, by
a violent rush when it was over; and had travelled through the night. He
appeared to, me "dazed" and worn. No man could well look more so than he
did, that sorrowful morning.

The end was near. A public dinner, which will have mention on a later
page, had been given him in Liverpool on the 10th of April, with Lord
Dufferin in the chair, and a reading wa