"Yes," he said, "I have it all in me. I could be as great a talker as any
man in England, but for my stammering. I know it well; but it's a blessed
thing for me. You must know, by this time, that I'm a very shy man, and
shyness and vanity always go together. And so I think of what every fool
will say of me, and can't help it. When a man's first thought is not
whether a thing is right or wrong, but what will Lady A., or Mr. B. say
about it, depend upon it he wants a thorn in the flesh, like my stammer.
When I am speaking for God, in the pulpit, or praying by bedsides, I never
stammer. My stammer is a blessed thing for me. It keeps me from talking in
company, and from going out as much as I should do but for it."

It was two o'clock before we thought of moving, and then, the fog being as
bad as ever, he insisted on making me up a bed on the floor. While we were
engaged in this process, he confided to me that he had heard of a doctor
who was very successful in curing stammering, and was going to try him. I
laughed, and reminded him of his thorn in the flesh, to which he replied,
with a quaint twinkle of his eye, "Well, that's true enough. But a man has
no right to be a nuisance, if he can help it, and no more right to go about
amongst his fellows stammering, than he has to go about stinking."

At this time he was already at work on another novel; and, in answer to a
remonstrance from a friend, who was anxious that he should keep ail his
strength for social reform, writes--

1851.--"I know that He has made me a parish priest, and that that is the
duty which lies nearest me, and that I may seem to be leaving my calling
in novel writing. But has He not taught me all these very things _by my_
parish priest life? Did He, too, let me become a strong, daring, sporting,
wild man of the woods for nothing? Surely the education He has given me so