his night's
engagement. He was constantly so exhausted at the conclusion of the
reading, that he had to lie down for twenty minutes or half an hour,
"before he could undergo the fatigue even of dressing." Mr. Dolby
lived in daily fear lest he should break down altogether. "I used to
steal into his room," he says, "at all hours of the night and early
morning, to see if he were awake, or in want of anything; always
though to find him wide awake, and as cheerful and jovial as
circumstances would admit--never in the least complaining, and only
reproaching me for not taking my night's rest." "Only a man of iron
will could have accomplished what he did," says Mr. Fields, who knew
him well, and saw him often during the tour.

In the first week of May, 1868, Dickens was back in England, and soon
again in the thick of his work and play. Mr. Wills, the sub-editor of
_All the Year Round_, had met with an accident. Dickens supplied his
place. Chauncy Hare Townshend had asked him to edit a chaotic mass of
religious lucubrations. He toilfully edited them. Then, with the
autumn, the readings began again;--for it marks the indomitable
energy of the man that, even amid the terrible physical trials
incident to his tour in America, he had agreed with Messrs. Chappell,
for a sum of L8,000, to give one hundred more readings after his
return. So in October the old work began again, and he was here,
there, and everywhere, now reading at Manchester and Liverpool, now at
Edinburgh and Glasgow, anon coming back to read fitfully in London,
then off again to Ireland, or the West of England. Nor is it necessary
to say that he spared himself not one whit. In order to give novelty
to these readings, which were to be positively the last, he had
laboriously got up the scene of Nancy's murder, in "Oliver Twist," and
persisted in giving it night after night, though of all his readings
it was the one that exhausted him most terribly.[34] But of course
this could not last. The pain in his foot "was always recurring at
inconvenient and unexpected moments," says Mr. Dolby, and occasionally
the American cold came back too. In February, in London, the foot was
worse than it had ever been, so bad that Sir Henry Thompson, and Mr.
Beard, his medical adviser, compelled him to postpone a reading. At
Edinburgh, a few days afterwards, Mr. Syme, the eminent surgeon,
strongly recommended perfect rest. Still he battled on, but "with
great personal suffering such as fe