your face!) this many a
year!'"[232] He had never seen men "go in to cry so undisguisedly," as
they did at the Belfast _Dombey_ reading; and as to the _Boots_ and
_Mrs. Gamp_ "it was just one roar with me and them. For they made me
laugh so, that sometimes I _could not_ compose my face to go on." His
greatest trial in this way however was a little later at
Harrogate--"the queerest place, with the strangest people in it, leading
the oddest lives of dancing, newspaper-reading, and tables
d'hote"--where he noticed, at the same reading, embodiments respectively
of the tears and laughter to which he has moved his fellow creatures so
largely. "There was one gentleman at the _Little Dombey_ yesterday
morning" (he is still writing to his sister-in-law) "who exhibited--or
rather concealed--the profoundest grief. After crying a good deal
without hiding it, he covered his face with both his hands, and laid it
down on the back of the seat before him, and really shook with emotion.
He was not in mourning, but I supposed him to have lost some child in
old time. . . . There was a remarkably good fellow too, of thirty or so,
who found something so very ludicrous in Toots that he _could not_
compose himself at all, but laughed until he sat wiping his eyes with
his handkerchief; and whenever he felt Toots coming again, he began to
laugh and wipe his eyes afresh; and when Toots came once more, he gave a
kind of cry, as if it were too much for him. It was uncommonly droll,
and made me laugh heartily."

At Harrogate he read twice on one day (a Saturday), and had to engage a
special engine to take him back that night to York, which, having
reached at one o'clock in the morning, he had to leave, because of
Sunday restrictions on travel, the same morning at half-past four, to
enable him to fulfil a Monday's reading at Scarborough. Such fatigues
became matters of course; but their effect, not noted at the time, was
grave. "At York I had a most magnificent audience, and might have
filled the place for a week. . . . I think the audience possessed of a
better knowledge of character than any I have seen. But I recollect
Doctor Belcombe to have told me long ago that they first found out
Charles Mathews's father, and to the last understood him (he used to
say) better than any other people. . . . The let is enormous for next
Saturday at Manchester, stalls alone four hundred! I shall soon be able
to send you the list of places to the 15th of November,