dren. She has been their playmate, nurse, instructress, friend,
protectress, adviser, companion. In the manly consideration towards
Mrs. Dickens, which I owe to my wife, I will only remark of her
that the peculiarity of her character has thrown all the children
on some one else. I do not know, I cannot by any stretch of fancy
imagine, what would have become of them but for this aunt, who has
grown up with them, to whom they are devoted, and who has
sacrificed the best part of her youth and life to them. She has
remonstrated, reasoned, suffered, and toiled, and come again to
prevent a separation between Mrs. Dickens and me. Mrs. Dickens has
often expressed to her her sense of her affectionate care and
devotion in the house,--never more strongly than within the last
twelve months."

Again, in the public statement which he prepared for "Household Words,"
alluding to a multitude of damaging rumors which were quickly put in
circulation, he says:--

"By some means, arising out of wickedness or out of folly or out of
inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has
been made the occasion of misrepresentations most grossly false,
most monstrous, and most cruel,--involving not only me, but
innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I
have no knowledge, if indeed they have any existence,--and so
widely spread that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse
these lines by whom some touch of the breath of these slanderers
will not have passed like an unwholesome air.

"Those who know me and my nature need no assurance under my hand
that such calumnies are as irreconcilable with me as they are in
their frantic incoherence with one another. But there is a great
multitude who know me through my writings and who do not know me
otherwise, and I cannot bear that one of them should be left in
doubt or hazard of doubt through my poorly shrinking from taking
the unusual means to which I now resort of circulating the truth. I
most solemnly declare then--and this I do both in my own name and
my wife's name--that all lately whispered rumors touching the
trouble at which I have glanced are abominably false; and that
whosoever repeats one of them, after this denial, will lie as
wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness