r to the sons of _Burke_'--meaning of course the murderer. In
short he fully confirmed Jerrold in all respects." The same letter told
me, too, something of his reading. Jerrold's _Story of a Feather_ he had
derived much enjoyment from. "Gauntwolf's sickness and the career of
that snuffbox, masterly.[86] I have been deep in Voyages and Travels,
and in De Foe. Tennyson I have also been reading, again and again. What
a great creature he is! . . . What about the _Goldsmith_? Apropos, I am all
eagerness to write a story about the length of that most delightful of
all stories, the _Vicar of Wakefield_."

In the second week of September he went to meet his brother Frederick at
Marseilles, and bring him back over the Cornice road to pass a
fortnight's holiday at Genoa; and his description of the first inn upon
the Alps they slept in is too good to be lost. "We lay last night," he
wrote (9th of September) "at the first halting-place on this journey,
in an inn which is not entitled, as it ought to be, The house of call
for fleas and vermin in general, but is entitled the grand hotel of the
Post! I hardly know what to compare it to. It seemed something like a
house in Somers-town originally built for a wine-vaults and never
finished, but grown very old. There was nothing to eat in it and nothing
to drink. They had lost the teapot; and when they found it, they
couldn't make out what had become of the lid, which, turning up at last
and being fixed on to the teapot, couldn't be got off again for the
pouring in of more water. Fleas of elephantine dimensions were
gambolling boldly in the dirty beds; and the mosquitoes!--But let me
here draw a curtain (as I would have done if there had been any). We had
scarcely any sleep, and rose up with hands and arms hardly human."

In four days they were at Albaro, and the morning after their arrival
Dickens underwent the terrible shock of seeing his brother very nearly
drowned in the bay. He swam out into too strong a current,[87] and was
only narrowly saved by the accident of a fishing-boat preparing to leave
the harbour at the time. "It was a world of horror and anguish," Dickens
wrote to me, "crowded into four or five minutes of dreadful agitation;
and, to complete the terror of it, Georgy, Charlotte" (the nurse), "and
the children were on a rock in full view of it all, crying, as you may
suppose, like mad creatures." His own bathing was from the rock, and, as
he had already told me, of the mos