walk miles away into the country,
and you can scarcely imagine by what deserted ramparts and silent little
cathedral closes, or how I pass over rusty drawbridges and stagnant
ditches out of and into the decaying town." For several consecutive
years I accompanied him every Christmas Eve to see the marketings for
Christmas down the road from Aldgate to Bow; and he had a surprising
fondness for wandering about in poor neighbourhoods on Christmas-day,
past the areas of shabby genteel houses in Somers or Kentish Towns, and
watching the dinners preparing or coming in. But the temptations of his
country life led him on to excesses in walking. "Coming in just now," he
wrote in his third year at Gadshill, "after twelve miles in the rain, I
was so wet that I have had to change and get my feet into warm water
before I could do anything." Again, two years later: "A south-easter
blowing, enough to cut one's throat. I am keeping the house for my cold,
as I did yesterday. But the remedy is so new to me, that I doubt if it
does me half the good of a dozen miles in the snow. So, if this mode of
treatment fails to-day, I shall try that to-morrow." He tried it perhaps
too often. In the winter of 1865 he first had the attack in his left
foot which materially disabled his walking-power for the rest of his
life. He supposed its cause to be overwalking in the snow, and that this
had aggravated the suffering is very likely; but, read by the light of
what followed, it may now be presumed to have had more serious origin.
It recurred at intervals, before America, without any such provocation;
in America it came back, not when he had most been walking in the snow,
but when nervous exhaustion was at its worst with him; after America, it
became prominent on the eve of the occurrence at Preston which first
revealed the progress that disease had been making in the vessels of the
brain; and in the last year of his life, as will immediately be seen,
it was a constant trouble and most intense suffering, extending then
gravely to his left hand also, which had before been only slightly
affected.

It was from a letter of the 21st of February 1865 I first learnt that he
was suffering tortures from a "frost-bitten" foot, and ten days later
brought more detailed account. "I got frost-bitten by walking
continually in the snow, and getting wet in the feet daily. My boots
hardened and softened, hardened and softened, my left foot swelled, and
I still forced the b