which shattered his health and sent him back a doomed man. Upon this aspect of his public life something will be said in a later chapter. The spring of 1868 saw him return, and before the end of the year he had entered upon a series of farewell readings in his own country. Defiant of the gravest physical symptoms,—it was not in the man's nature to believe that he could be beaten in anything he undertook,—he laboured through a self-imposed duty which would have tasked him severely even in the time of robust health, and finally took leave of his audience on the 5th of April, 1870. Meanwhile (in a few months of rest to which he was constrained by medical advice) he had begun the writing of a new book, which was to appear in twelve monthly numbers, instead of the old heroic twenty; its name, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Six numbers only were finished. As an indication of the disturbance of mental habit caused by the author's life as a public entertainer, Forster mentions that Dickens miscalculated the length (in print) of his first two parts by no less than twelve pages; ominous error in one who had rarely found his calculation in this matter wrong even by a line. Beyond the sixth part, only a disjointed scene was written. He worked in his garden house at Gadshill,—the home endeared to him by
