ed in many things he wrote
after his return to England. The pictures he drew of American life in
_Martin Chuzzlewit_ were both unjust and untrue, and made him for a time
lose a large part of the good opinion which American readers had had for
him. Dickens soon came to regret the writing of these chapters, and
when, twenty-five years later, he visited the United States a second
time, he did all in his power to show his kindly feeling, and America
admired and loved him so much that it gradually forgot the incident in
the great pleasure with which it read his stories.

Dickens was a very active man, and his life was simple and full of work
and exercise. He rose early and almost every day might have been seen
tramping for miles along the country roads, or riding horseback with his
dogs racing after him. He liked best to wander along the cliffs or
across the downs by the sea. When he was in London he often walked the
streets half the night, thinking out his stories, or searching for the
odd characters which he put in them. This natural activity and
restlessness even led him sometimes to make political speeches, and
finally to the establishment of a new London newspaper--the _Daily
News_--of which he was the first editor. Before this, he had started a
weekly journal, in which several of his stories had appeared, but it had
not been very successful. It was not long before he withdrew also from
this second venture.

In the meantime he had met with both joy and sorrow. Several children
had been born to him. His much loved sister, his father, and his own
little daughter, the youngest of his family, had died. These sorrows
made him throw himself into his work with greater earnestness. He even
found leisure to organize a theatrical company (in which he himself
acted with a number of other famous writers of the time), which gave
several plays for the benefit of charity. One of these was performed
before Queen Victoria.

People have often wondered how Dickens found time to accomplish so many
different things. One of the secrets of this, no doubt, was his love of
order. He was the most systematic of men. Everything he did "went like
clockwork," and he prided himself on his punctuality. He could not work
in a room unless everything in it was in its proper place. As a
consequence of this habit of regularity, he never wasted time.

The work of editorship was very pleasant to Dickens, and scarcely three
years after his leaving the _Da