people enough to make immense houses for a
week." Letter to his eldest daughter.

[231] "Shillings get into stalls, and half-crowns get into shillings,
and stalls get nowhere, and there is immense confusion." Letter to his
daughter.

[232] "I was brought very near to what I sometimes dream may be my
Fame," he says in a letter of later date to myself from York, "when a
lady whose face I had never seen stopped me yesterday in the street, and
said to me, _Mr. Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled
my house with many friends_." October 1858.

[233] "That is no doubt immense, our expenses being necessarily large,
and the travelling party being always five." Another source of profit
was the sale of the copies of the several Readings prepared by himself.
"Our people alone sell eight, ten, and twelve dozen a night." A later
letter says: "The men with the reading books were sold out, for about
the twentieth time, at Manchester. Eleven dozen of the _Poor Traveller_,
_Boots_, and _Gamp_ being sold in about ten minutes, they had no more
left; and Manchester became green with the little tracts, in every
bookshop, outside every omnibus, and passing along every street. The
sale of them, apart from us, must be very great." "Did I tell you," he
writes in another letter, "that the agents for our tickets who are also
booksellers, say very generally that the readings decidedly increase the
sale of the books they are taken from? We were first told of this by a
Mr. Parke, a wealthy old gentleman in a very large way at Wolverhampton,
who did all the business for love, and would not take a farthing. Since
then, we have constantly come upon it; and M'Glashin and Gill at Dublin
were very strong about it indeed."

[234] The last of them were given immediately after his completion of
the _Tale of Two Cities_: "I am a little tired; but as little, I
suspect, as any man could be with the work of the last four days, and
perhaps the change of work was better than subsiding into rest and rust.
The Norwich people were a noble audience. There, and at Ipswich and
Bury, we had the demonstrativeness of the great working-towns, and a
much finer perception."--14th of October 1859.

[235] Two pleasing little volumes may here be named as devoted to
special descriptions of the several Readings; by his friend Mr. Charles
Kent in England (_Charles Dickens as a Reader_), and by Miss Kate Field
in America (_Pen Photographs_).

[236] Let me su