in any direction without finding some opportunity to benefit them.  One of these many kindnesses came to the public ear during the last summer of his life.  He was dressing in his own bedroom in the morning, when he saw two Savoyards and two bears come up to the Falstaff Inn opposite.  While he was watching the odd company, two English bullies joined the little party and insisted upon taking the muzzles off the bears in order to have a dance with them.  “At once,” said Dickens, “I saw there would be trouble, and I watched the scene with the greatest anxiety.  In a moment I saw how things were going, and without delay I found myself at the gate.  I called the gardener by the way, but he managed to hold himself at safe distance behind the fence.  I put the Savoyards instantly in a secure position, asked the bullies what they were at, forced them to muzzle the bears again, under threat of sending for the police, and ended the whole affair in so short a time that I was not missed from the house.  Unfortunately, while I was covered with dust and blood, for the bears had already attacked one of the men when I arrived, I heard a carriage roll by.  I thought nothing of it at the time, but the report in the foreign journals which startled and shocked my friends so much came probably from the occupants of that vehicle.  Unhappily, in my desire to save the men, I entirely forgot the dogs, and ordered the bears to be carried into the stable-yard until the scuffle should be over, when a tremendous tumult arose between the bears and the dogs.  Fortunately we were able to separate them without injury, and the whole was so soon over that it was hard to make the family believe, when I came in to breakfast, that anything of the kind had gone forward.”  It was the newspaper report, causing anxiety to some absent friends, which led, on inquiry, to this rehearsal of the incident.

Who does not know Cobham Park?  Has Dickens not invited us there in the old days to meet Mr. Pickwick, who pronounced it “delightful!—­thoroughly delightful,” while “the skin of his expressive countenance was rapidly peeling off with exposure to the sun”?  Has he not invited the world to enjoy the loveliness of its solitudes with him, and peopled its haunts for us again and again?

Our first real visit to Cobham Park was on a summer morning when Dickens walked out with us from his own gate, and, strolling quietly along the road, turned at length into what seemed a rural wooded pathway.  At first we did not associate the spot in its spring freshness with that morning after Christmas when he had supped with the “Seven Poor Travellers,” and lain awake all night with thinking of them; and after parting in the morning with a kindly shake of the hand all round, started to walk through Cobham woods on his way towards London.  Then on his lonely road, “the mists began to rise in the most beautiful manner and the sun to shine; and as I went on,” he writes, “through the bracing