gland._ Can you write?

"_Young Ireland,_ Not yet. Things comes by deegrays.

"_Old England._ Can you cipher?

"_Young Ireland_ (very quickly). Whaat's that?

"_Old England._ Can you make figures?

"_Young Ireland._ I can make a nought, which is not asy, being roond.

"_Old England._ I say, old boy! Wasn't it you I saw on Sunday morning in
the Hall, in a soldier's cap? You know!--In a soldier's cap?

"_Young Ireland_ (cogitating deeply). Was it a very good cap?

"_Old England._ Yes.

"_Young Ireland._ Did it fit ankommon?

"_Old England._ Yes.

"_Young Ireland._ Dat was me!"

The last night in Dublin was an extraordinary scene. "You can hardly
imagine it. All the way from the hotel to the Rotunda (a mile), I had to
contend against the stream of people who were turned away. When I got
there, they had broken the glass in the pay-boxes, and were offering L5
freely for a stall. Half of my platform had to be taken down, and people
heaped in among the ruins. You never saw such a scene."[230] But he
would not return after his other Irish engagements. "I have positively
said No. The work is too hard. It is not like doing it in one easy room,
and always the same room. With a different place every night, and a
different audience with its own peculiarity every night, it is a
tremendous strain. . . . I seem to be always either in a railway carriage
or reading, or going to bed; and I get so knocked up whenever I have a
minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course."

Belfast he liked quite as much as Dublin in another way. "A fine place
with a rough people; everything looking prosperous; the railway ride
from Dublin quite amazing in the order, neatness, and cleanness of all
you see; every cottage looking as if it had been whitewashed the day
before; and many with charming gardens, prettily kept with bright
flowers." The success, too, was quite as great. "Enormous audiences. We
turn away half the town.[231] I think them a better audience on the
whole than Dublin; and the personal affection is something overwhelming.
I wish you and the dear girls" (he is writing to his sister-in-law)
"could have seen the people look at me in the street; or heard them ask
me, as I hurried to the hotel after the reading last night, to 'do me
the honor to shake hands Misther Dickens and God bless you sir; not
ounly for the light you've been to me this night, but for the light
you've been in mee house sir (and God love