ke place at half past seven, and when he was informed of the hour, he
said he would try and be ready at eight o'clock, but thought it very
doubtful. Horrified at this assertion, I tried to impress upon him the
importance of punctuality on this, the night of his first bow to an
American audience. At a quarter past seven I called for him, and found
him not only unshaved and undressed for the evening, but rapturously
absorbed in making a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a passage in
Goethe's Sorrows of Werther, for a lady, which illustration,--a charming
one, by the way, for he was greatly skilled in drawing,--he vowed he
would finish before he would budge an inch in the direction of the (I
omit the adjective) Melodeon. A comical incident occurred just as he was
about leaving the hall, after his first lecture in Boston. A shabby,
ungainly looking man stepped briskly up to him in the anteroom, seized
his hand and announced himself as "proprietor of the Mammoth Rat," and
proposed to exchange season tickets. Thackeray, with the utmost gravity,
exchanged cards and promised to call on the wonderful quadruped next
day.

Thackeray's motto was 'Avoid performing to-day, if possible, what can be
postponed till to-morrow.' Although he received large sums for his
writings, he managed without much difficulty to keep his expenditures
fully abreast, and often in advance of, his receipts. His pecuniary
object in visiting America the second time was to lay up, as he said, a
"pot of money" for his two daughters, and he left the country with more
than half his lecture engagements unfulfilled. He was to have visited
various cities in the Middle and Western States; but he took up a
newspaper one night, in his hotel in New York, before retiring, saw a
steamer advertised to sail the next morning for England, was seized with
a sudden fit of homesickness, rang the bell for his servant, who packed
up his luggage that night, and the next day he sailed. The first
intimation I had of his departure was a card which he sent by the pilot
of the steamer, with these words upon it: "Good by, Fields; good by,
Mrs. Fields; God bless everybody, says W.M.T." Of course he did not
avail himself of the opportunity afforded him for receiving a very large
sum in America, and he afterwards told me in London, that if Mr. Astor
had offered him half his fortune if he would allow that particular
steamer to sail without him, he should have declined the
well-intentioned b