leby_ continues to
go in the wildest manner."

A storm was at this time sweeping round the coast, and while at Dover he
had written of it to his sister-in-law (7th of November): "The bad
weather has not in the least touched us, and the storm was most
magnificent at Dover. All the great side of the Lord Warden next the
sea had to be emptied, the break of the waves was so prodigious, and the
noise so utterly confounding. The sea came in like a great sky of
immense clouds, for ever breaking suddenly into furious rain; all kinds
of wreck were washed in; among other things, a very pretty brass-bound
chest being thrown about like a feather. . . . The unhappy Ostend packet,
unable to get in or go back, beat about the Channel all Tuesday night,
and until noon yesterday; when I saw her come in, with five men at the
wheel, a picture of misery inconceivable. . . . The effect of the readings
at Hastings and Dover really seems to have outdone the best usual
impression; and at Dover they wouldn't go, but sat applauding like mad.
The most delicate audience I have seen in any provincial place, is
Canterbury" ("an intelligent and delightful response in them," he wrote
to his daughter, "like the touch of a beautiful instrument"); "but the
audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover. The
people in the stalls set the example of laughing, in the most curiously
unreserved way; and they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment,
when Squeers read the boys' letters, that the contagion extended to me.
For, one couldn't hear them without laughing too. . . . So, I am thankful
to say, all goes well, and the recompense for the trouble is in every
way Great."

From the opposite quarter of Berwick-on-Tweed he wrote again in the
midst of storm. But first his mention of Newcastle, which he had also
taken on his way to Edinburgh, reading two nights there, should be
given. "At Newcastle, against the very heavy expenses, I made more than
a hundred guineas profit. A finer audience there is not in England, and
I suppose them to be a specially earnest people; for, while they can
laugh till they shake the roof, they have a very unusual sympathy with
what is pathetic or passionate. An extraordinary thing occurred on the
second night. The room was tremendously crowded and my gas-apparatus
fell down. There was a terrible wave among the people for an instant,
and God knows what destruction of life a rush to the stairs would have
caused. Fortu