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Tacts and fancies for the Tireside
DICKENS IN CAMP.
Charles Dickens died in his home
at Gadshill, in Kent, on June 9,
1870. The weeks preceding his
death had been weeks of fatigue and
illness; but with the coming of the
warm summer days he seemed once
more to exhibit his old vitality.
Many incidents that gave him pleas
ure had occurred. A resident of
Liverpool had written him a letter
describing himself as a self-made
man who believed that he owed his
success to what Dickens had written
about the wisdom of kindness and
sympathy for others. The writer en
closed a check for five hundred
pounds which he begged the author
to accept as a slight acknowledgment
of the benefits received. This letter
greatly touched Dickens, who re
turned the check, but said that it
would give him pleasure to receive
any slight remembrance given in an
other form. His correspondent then
sent him an elaborate silver basket
and a silver centerpiece containing
figures representing the four seasons.
The donor, however, had shrunk from
sending a symbol of winter to one
who had-then passed the autumn of
his life, and so he had removed this
figure from the design.
“I never look at it,” said Dick
ens, “without thinking most of win
ter!”
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On the day before his death, the
novelist had been steadily at work
upon his last book, “The Mystery of
Edwin Drood”; and had finished a
beautiful description of a summer
morning. When this was completed,
he was taken with a sudden pain,
and presently became unconscious.
He died the next evening in the fifty
eighth year of his age. The news of
his death was telegraphed all over
the civilized world, and was received
everywhere with grief and sympathy.
Men and women of every rank and
type joined in the expression of sor
row; for Dickens, through his in
tense humanity, had appealed alike
to the noble and the lowly. One of
the most touching tributes to the un
iversality of his fame was written by
the pen of Bret Harte in the poem
which is here reprinted, and which
shows that in a rough mining-camp
of the Far West the creator of “Lit
tle Nell” was known and loved no
less sincerely than in the stately
dwellings of his own country.
By Bret Harte.
Above the pines the moon was slow
ly drifting,
The river sang below;
The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplift
ing
Their minarets of snow.
WATSON’S WEEKLY JEFFERSONIAN.
The roaring camp-fire, with rude hu*
mor, painted
The ruddy tints of health
On haggard face and form that
drooped and fainted
In the fierce race for wealth;
Till one arose, and from his pack’s
scant treasure
A hoarded volume drew,
And cards were dropped from hands
of listless leisure
To hear the tale anew.
And then, while round them shadows
gathered faster,
And as the firelight fell,
He read aloud the book wherein the
Master
Had writ of Little Nell.
Perhaps ’twas boyish fancy—for the
reader
Was the youngest of them all—
But, as he read, from clustering pine
and cedar
A silence seemed to fall;
The pine-trees, gathering closer in
the shadowa,
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp, with Nell on
English meadows,
Wandered and lost their way.
And so in mountain solitudes —o’er-
taken
As by some spell divine,
Their cares dropped from them like
the needles shaken
From out the sturdy pine.
Lost is that eamp, and wasted all its
fire:
And he who wrought the spell f
Ah, towering pine and stately Kent
ish spire,
Ye have one tale to tell!
Lost is that camp! But let its fra
grant story
Blend with the heart that thrills
With hop-vines’ incense all the pen
sive glory
That fills the Kentish hills.
And on that grave where English
oak and holly
And laurel-wreaths entwine,
Deem it not all a too presumptuous
folly—
This spray of Western pine!
ETERNITY.
“Eternity,” said the country ex
hort er, who wanted to make things
clear, “is forever and forever, and
five or six everlastings on top of
that. Why, brothers and sisters,
after millions and billions of centu
ries had rolled away in eternity, it
would still be a hundred thousand
years to breakfast time.”
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