enting the Paris theatres with great assiduity and admiration.
Meanwhile, too, on the 14th of March, 1856, a Friday, his lucky day as
he considered it, he had written a cheque for the purchase of Gad's
Hill Place, at which he had so often looked when a little lad, living
penuriously at Chatham--the house which it had been the object of his
childish ambition to win for his own.

So had merit proved to be not without its visible prize, literally a
prize for good conduct. He took possession of the house in the
following February, and turned workmen into it, and finished "Little
Dorrit" there. At first the purchase was intended mainly as an
investment, and he only purposed to spend some portion of his time at
Gad's Hill, letting it at other periods, and so recouping himself for
the interest on the L1,790 which it had cost, and for the further sums
which he expended on improvements. But as time went on it became his
hobby, the love of his advancing years. He beautified here and
beautified there, built a new drawing-room, added bedrooms,
constructed a tunnel under the road, erected in the "wilderness" on
the other side of the road a Swiss chalet, which had been presented to
him by Fechter, the French-English actor, and in short indulged in all
the thousand and one vagaries of a proprietor who is enamoured of his
property. The matter seems to have been one of the family jokes; and
when, on the Sunday before his death, he showed the conservatory to
his younger daughter, and said, "Well, Katey, now you see _positively_
the last improvement at Gad's Hill," there was a general laugh. But
this is far on in the story; and very long before the building of the
conservatory, long indeed before the main other changes had been made,
the idea of an investment had been abandoned. In 1860 he sold
Tavistock House, in London, and made Gad's Hill Place his final home.

Even here, however, I am anticipating; for before getting to 1860
there is in Dickens' history a page which one would willingly turn
over, if that were possible, in silence and sadness. But it is not
possible. No account of his life would be complete, and what is of
more importance, true, if it made no mention of his relations with his
wife.

For some time before 1858 Dickens had been in an over-excited,
nervous, morbid state. During earlier manhood his animal spirits and
fresh energy had been superb. Now, as the years advanced, and
especially at this particular time, the ene