nately a lady in the front of the stalls ran out towards
me, exactly in a place where I knew that the whole hall could see her.
So I addressed her, laughing, and half-asked and half-ordered her to sit
down again; and, in a moment, it was all over. But the men in attendance
had such a fearful sense of what might have happened (besides the real
danger of Fire) that they positively shook the boards I stood on, with
their trembling, when they came up to put things right. I am proud to
record that the gas-man's sentiment, as delivered afterwards, was, 'The
more you want of the master, the more you'll find in him.' With which
complimentary homage, and with the wind blowing so that I can hardly
hear myself write, I conclude."[246]

It was still blowing, in shape of a gale from the sea, when, an hour
before the reading, he wrote from the King's Arms at Berwick-on-Tweed.
"As odd and out of the way a place to be at, it appears to me, as ever
was seen! And such a ridiculous room designed for me to read in! An
immense Corn Exchange, made of glass and iron, round, dome-topp'd,
lofty, utterly absurd for any such purpose, and full of thundering
echoes; with a little lofty crow's nest of a stone gallery, breast high,
deep in the wall, into which it was designed to put----_me_! I instantly
struck, of course; and said I would either read in a room attached to
this house (a very snug one, capable of holding 500 people), or not at
all. Terrified local agents glowered, but fell prostrate, and my men
took the primitive accommodation in hand. Ever since, I am alarmed to
add, the people (who besought the honour of the visit) have been coming
in numbers quite irreconcileable with the appearance of the place, and
what is to be the end I do not know. It was poor Arthur Smith's
principle that a town on the way paid the expenses of a long
through-journey, and therefore I came." The Reading paid more than
those expenses.

Enthusiastic greeting awaited him in Edinburgh. "We had in the hall
exactly double what we had on the first night last time. The success of
_Copperfield_ was perfectly unexampled. Four great rounds of applause
with a burst of cheering at the end, and every point taken in the finest
manner." But this was nothing to what befell on the second night, when,
by some mistake of the local agents, the tickets issued were out of
proportion to the space available. Writing from Glasgow next day (3rd of
December) he described the scene. "Such