Early in September, when I had parted from him to go to Paris, I left him methodically and industriously arranging for his début. He had brought some letters, mainly to newspaper people, and was already making progress toward what might be called the interior circles of the press, which are so essential to the success of a newcomer in London. Charles Reade and Andrew Haliday became zealous friends. It was to the latter that he owed his introduction to the Savage Club. Here he soon made himself at home. His manners, even his voice, were half English, albeit he possessed a most engaging disposition—a ready tact and keen discernment, very un-English,—and these won him an efficient corps of claquers and backers throughout the newspapers and periodicals of the metropolis. Thus his success was assured from the first. The raw November evening when he opened at Egyptian Hall the room was crowded with an audience of literary men and women, great and small, from Swinburne and Edmund Yates to the trumpeters and reporters of the morning papers. The next day most of these contained glowing accounts. The Times was silent, but four days later The Thunderer, seeing how the wind blew, came out with a column of eulogy, and from this onward, each evening proved a kind of ovation. Seats were engaged for a week in advance. Up and down Piccadilly, from St. James Church to St. James Street, carriages bearing the first arms in the kingdom were parked night after night; and the evening of the 21st of December, six weeks after, there was no falling off. The success was complete. As to an American, London had never seen the like. All this while the poor author of the sport was slowly dying. The demands upon his animal spirits at the Savage Club, the bodily fatigue of “getting himself up to it,” the “damnable iteration” of the lecture itself, wore him out. George, his valet, whom he had brought from America, had finally to lift him about his bedroom like a child. His quarters in Picadilly, as I have said, were just opposite the Hall, but he could not go backward and forward without assistance. It was painful in the extreme to see the man who was undergoing tortures behind the curtain step lightly before the audience amid a burst of merriment, and for more than an hour sustain the part of jester, tossing his cap and jingling his bells, a painted death’s head, for he had to rouge his face to hide the pallor. His buoyancy forsook him. He was occasionally nervous and fretful. The fog, he declared, felt like a winding sheet, enwrapping and strangling him. At one of his entertainments he made a grim, serio-comic allusion to this. “But,” cried he as he came off the stage, “that was not a hit, was it? The English are scary about death. I’ll have to cut it out.”