to later generations as Mrs. Mary Gibson of Front Row,
Ordnance Place, Chatham, who died in the spring of the year 1888, at the
advanced age of eighty-four. Very touchingly, but unknowingly, did
Dickens write from Gad's Hill, 24th September, 1857, being unaware that
she was still living:--

"I feel much as I used to do when I was a small child, a few miles off,
and somebody--_who_, I wonder, and which way did _she_ go when she
died?--hummed the evening hymn, and I cried on the pillow--either with
the remorseful consciousness of having kicked somebody else, or because
still somebody else had hurt my feelings in the course of the day."

Mrs. Gibson, when Mary Weller (what a host of pleasant recollections
does the married name of the "pretty housemaid" bring up of the
Pickwickian days!), lived with the family of Mr. John Dickens, at No.
11, Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, and afterwards when they moved to the
House on the Brook. Her recollections were most vivid and interesting.
According to the testimony of her son, communicated to Mr. Wildish, Mrs.
Gibson "used to be very fond of talking of the time she passed with the
Dickens family, and one of her highest satisfactions in her later years
was to hear Charles Dickens's works read by her son Robert; and while
listening to the descriptions of characters read to her, his mother
would detect likenesses unsuspected by other persons whom Dickens must
have known when a boy; and she also agreed in thinking, with Dickens's
biographer, that in Mr. Micawber's troubles were related some of the
experiences of the elder Dickens, who is believed for a time to have
occupied a debtor's prison. She, however, would never bring herself to
believe that her hero was himself ever reduced to such great hardships
as the blacking-bottle period in _David Copperfield_ would suggest if
taken literally. She used to speak of the future author as always fond
of reading, and said he was wont to retire to the top room of the House
on the Brook, and spend what should have been his play-hours in poring
over his books, or in acting to the furniture of the room the creatures
that he had read about."

Mr. Langton, who had a personal interview with Mrs. Gibson herself, has
recorded the fact that she well remembered singing the Evening Hymn to
the children of John Dickens, and seemed very much surprised at being
asked such a question. She lived with the family when Dickens's little
sister, Harriet Ellen, died--a