I never ceased to wonder at Dickens’s indomitable cheerfulness, even when he was suffering from ill health, and could not sleep more than two or three hours out of the twenty-four.  He made it a point never to inflict on another what he might be painfully enduring himself, and I have seen him, with what must have been a great effort, arrange a merry meeting for some friends, when I knew that almost any one else under similar circumstances would have sought relief in bed.

One evening at a little dinner given by himself to half a dozen friends in Boston, he came out very strong.  His influenza lifted a little, as he said afterwards, and he took advantage of the lull.  Only his own pen could possibly give an idea of that hilarious night, and I will merely attempt a brief reference to it.  As soon as we were seated at the table, I read in his lustrous eye, and heard in his jovial voice, that all solemn forms were to be dispensed with on that occasion, and that merriment might be confidently expected.  To the end of the feast there was no let up to his magnificent cheerfulness and humor.  J——­ B——­, ex-minister plenipotentiary as he was, went in for nonsense, and he, I am sure, will not soon forget how undignified we all were, and what screams of laughter went up from his own uncontrollable throat.  Among other tomfooleries, we had an imitation of scenes at an English hustings, Dickens bringing on his candidate (his friend D——­), and I opposing him with mine (the ex-minister).  Of course there was nothing spoken in the speeches worth remembering, but it was Dickens’s manner that carried off the whole thing.  D——­ necessarily now wears his hair so widely parted in the middle that only two little capillary scraps are left, just over his ears, to show what kind of thatch once covered his jolly cranium.  Dickens pretended that his candidate was superior to the other, because he had no hair; and that mine, being profusely supplied with that commodity was in consequence disqualified in a marked degree for an election.  His speech, for volubility and nonsense, was nearly fatal to us all.  We roared and writhed in agonies of laughter, and the candidates themselves were literally choking and crying with the humor of the thing.  But the fun culminated when I tried to get a hearing in behalf of my man, and Dickens drowned all my attempts to be heard with imitative jeers of a boisterous election mob.  He seemed to have as many voices that night as the human throat is capable of, and the repeated interrupting shouts, among others, of a pretended husky old man bawling out at intervals, “Three cheers for the bald ’un!” “Down vith the hairy aristocracy!” “Up vith the little shiny chap on top!” and other similar outbursts, I can never forget.  At last, in sheer exhaustion, we all gave in, and agreed to break up and thus save our lives, if it were not already too late to make the attempt.