ng that the
tickets were gone, the people had to be got in through such a crowd as
rendered it a work of the utmost difficulty to keep an alley into the
room. They were seated about me on the platform, put into the doorway of
the waiting-room, squeezed into every conceivable place, and a multitude
turned away once more. I think I am better pleased with what was done in
Edinburgh than with what has been done anywhere, almost. It was so
completely taken by storm, and carried in spite of itself. Mary and
Katey have been infinitely pleased and interested with Edinburgh. We are
just going to sit down to dinner and therefore I cut my missive short.
Travelling, dinner, reading, and everything else, come crowding together
into this strange life."

Then came Dundee: "An odd place," he wrote, "like Wapping with high
rugged hills behind it. We had the strangest journey here--bits of sea,
and bits of railroad, alternately; which carried my mind back to
travelling in America. The room is an immense new one, belonging to Lord
Kinnaird, and Lord Panmure, and some others of that sort. It looks
something between the Crystal-palace and Westminster-hall (I can't
imagine who wants it in this place), and has never been tried yet for
speaking in. Quite disinterestedly of course, I hope it will succeed."
The people he thought, in respect of taste and intelligence, below any
other of his Scotch audiences; but they woke up surprisingly, and the
rest of his Caledonian tour was a succession of triumphs. "At Aberdeen
we were crammed to the street, twice in one day. At Perth (where I
thought when I arrived, there literally could be nobody to come) the
gentlefolk came posting in from thirty miles round, and the whole town
came besides, and filled an immense hall. They were as full of
perception, fire, and enthusiasm as any people I have seen. At Glasgow,
where I read three evenings and one morning, we took the prodigiously
large sum of six hundred pounds! And this at the Manchester prices,
which are lower than St. Martin's Hall. As to the effect--I wish you
could have seen them after Lilian died in the _Chimes_, or when Scrooge
woke in the _Carol_ and talked to the boy outside the window. And at the
end of _Dombey_ yesterday afternoon, in the cold light of day, they all
got up, after a short pause, gentle and simple, and thundered and waved
their hats with such astonishing heartiness and fondness that, for the
first time in all my public career, the