eparture the next
morning. His condition was pitiable. He was too feeble to walk alone,
and was continually struggling to breathe freely. His surgeon had
forbidden the use of wine or liquor of any sort. Instead he drank
quantities of water, eating little and taking no exercise at all.
Nevertheless, he stuck to his lecture and contrived to keep up
appearances before the crowds that flocked to hear him, and even in
London his critical state of health was not suspected.

Early in September, when I had parted from him to go to Paris, I left
him methodically and industriously arranging for his debut. He had
brought some letters, mainly to newspaper people, and was already making
progress toward what might be called the interior circles of the press,
which are so essential to the success of a newcomer in London. Charles
Reade and Andrew Haliday became zealous friends. It was to the latter
that he owed his introduction to the Savage Club. Here he soon made
himself at home. His manners, even his voice, were half English,
albeit he possessed a most engaging disposition--a ready tact and keen
discernment, very un-English,--and these won him an efficient corps of
claquers and backers throughout the newspapers and periodicals of the
metropolis. Thus his success was assured from the first.

The raw November evening when he opened at Egyptian Hall the room was
crowded with an audience of literary men and women, great and small,
from Swinburne and Edmund Yates to the trumpeters and reporters of the
morning papers. The next day most of these contained glowing accounts.
The Times was silent, but four days later The Thunderer, seeing how the
wind blew, came out with a column of eulogy, and from this onward,
each evening proved a kind of ovation. Seats were engaged for a week
in advance. Up and down Piccadilly, from St. James Church to St. James
Street, carriages bearing the first arms in the kingdom were parked
night after night; and the evening of the 21st of December, six weeks
after, there was no falling off. The success was complete. As to an
American, London had never seen the like.

All this while the poor author of the sport was slowly dying. The
demands upon his animal spirits at the Savage Club, the bodily fatigue
of "getting himself up to it," the "damnable iteration" of the lecture
itself, wore him out. George, his valet, whom he had brought from
America, had finally to lift him about his bedroom like a child. His
quarters