ding on with a rapidity quite
beyond anticipation, when the time, which had been carefully marked at
the commencement of the Reading, came to be notified at its conclusion.
That the merest first rehearsal should have run off thus glibly seemed
just simply incomprehensible. With the sense of this surprise still
fresh upon us, the tentative Reading being at the time only a
few seconds completed, everything was explained, however, by a
half-whispered remark made, to the present writer, in passing, by the
Novelist--made by him half-weariedly, yet half-laughingly--"There! If
I have gone through that already to myself once, I have gone through it
two--hundred--times!" It was not lightly or carelessly therefore, as
may now be seen, that Charles Dickens, in his later capacity--not
pen-in-hand, or through green monthly numbers, but standing at a
reading-desk upon a public platform--undertook the office of a popular
entertainer.

Resolved throughout his career as a Reader to acquit himself of those
newly-assumed responsibilities to the utmost of his powers, to the
fullest extent of his capabilities, both physical and intellectual, he
applied his energies to the task, with a zeal that, it is impossible not
to recognise now, amounted in the end to nothing less than (literally)
self-sacrifice. But for the devotion of his energies thus unstintingly
to the laborious task upon which he had adventured--a task involving in
its accomplishment an enormous amount of rapid travelling by railway,
keeping him for months together, besides, in one ceaseless whirl of
bodily and mental excitement--his splendid constitution, sustained and
strengthened as it was by his wholesome enjoyment of out-of-door life,
and his habitual indulgence in bathing and pedes-trianism, gave him
every reasonable hope of reaching the age of an octogenarian.

Bearing in mind in addition to the wear-and-tear of the Readings in
England and America, the nervous shock of that terrible railway accident
at Staplehurst, on the 9th of June, 1865, the lamentable catastrophe of
exactly five years afterwards to the very day, that of the 9th of June,
1870, becomes readily comprehensible. Because of his absorption in his
task, however, all through, he was unconscious for the most part of the
wasting influence of his labours, or, if he was so at all towards the
close of his career, he was so, even then, only fitfully and at the
rarest intervals. Precisely in the same way, it may be r