Dickens had timed our visit to his country house in Kent, and arranged that we should appear at Gad’s Hill with the nightingales.  Arriving at the Higham station on a bright June day in 1869, we found his stout little pony ready to take us up the hill; and before we had proceeded far on the road, the master himself came out to welcome us on the way.  He looked brown and hearty, and told us he had passed a breezy morning writing in the chalet.  We had parted from him only a few days before in London, but I thought the country air had already begun to exert its strengthening influence,—­a process he said which commonly set in the moment he reached his garden gate.

It was ten years since I had seen Gad’s Hill Place, and I observed at once what extensive improvements had been made during that period.  Dickens had increased his estate by adding quite a large tract of land on the opposite side of the road, and a beautiful meadow at the back of the house.  He had connected the front lawn, by a passageway running under the road, with beautifully wooded grounds, on which was erected the Swiss chalet, a present from Fechter.  The old house, too, had been greatly improved, and there was an air of assured comfort and ease about the charming establishment.  No one could surpass Dickens as a host; and as there were certain household rules (hours for meals, recreation, etc.), he at once announced them, so that visitors never lost any time “wondering” when this or that was to happen.

Lunch over, we were taken round to see the dogs, and Dickens gave us a rapid biographical account of each as we made acquaintance with the whole colony.  One old fellow, who had grown superannuated and nearly blind, raised himself up and laid his great black head against Dickens’s breast as if he loved him.  All were spoken to with pleasant words of greeting, and the whole troop seemed wild with joy over the master’s visit.  “Linda” put up her shaggy paw to be shaken at parting; and as we left the dog-houses, our host told us some amusing anecdotes of his favorite friends.

Dickens’s admiration of Hogarth was unbounded, and he had hung the staircase leading up from the hall of his house with fine old impressions of the great master’s best works.  Observing our immediate interest in these pictures, he seemed greatly pleased, and proceeded at once to point out in his graphic way what had struck his own fancy most in Hogarth’s genius.  He had made a study of the painter’s thought as displayed in these works, and his talk about the artist was delightful.  He used to say he never came down the stairs without pausing with new wonder over the fertility of the mind that had conceived and the hand that had executed these powerful pictures of human life; and I cannot forget with what fervid energy and feeling he repeated one day, as we were standing together on the stairs in front of the Hogarth pictures, Dr. Johnson’s epitaph, on the painter:—­