My boy Sydney is now a second lieutenant, the youngest in the Service, I believe. He has the highest testimonials as an officer.
You may be quite sure there will be no international racing in American waters. Oxford knows better, or I am mistaken. The Harvard crew were a very good set of fellows, and very modest.
Ryland of Birmingham doesn't look a day older, and was full of interest in you, and asked me to remind you of him. By-the-bye, at Elkington's I saw a pair of immense tea-urns from a railway station (Stafford), sent there to be repaired. They were honeycombed within in all directions, and had been supplying the passengers, under the active agency of hot water, with decomposed lead, copper, and a few other deadly poisons, for heaven knows how many years!
I must leave off in a hurry to catch the post, after a hard day's work.
Ever, my dearest Macready,
Your most affectionate and attached.
1870.
NARRATIVE.
Charles Dickens passed his last Christmas and New Year's Day at Gad's Hill, with a party of family and friends, in the usual way, except that he was suffering again from an attack of the foot trouble, particularly on Christmas Day, when he was quite disabled by it and unable to walk at all—able only to join the party in the evening by keeping his room all day. However, he was better in a day or two, and early in January he went to London, where he had taken the house of his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Milner Gibson, for the season.