rmerly stayed at, and thought a very big one, is
now regarded as a very small affair. I do not yet notice--but a day, you
know, is not a long time for observation!--any marked change in
character or habits. In this immense hotel I live very high up, and have
a hot and cold bath in my bed room, with other comforts not in existence
in my former day. The cost of living is enormous." "Two of the staff are
at New York," he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 25th of November,
"where we are at our wits' end how to keep tickets out of the hands of
speculators. We have communications from all parts of the country, but
we take no offer whatever. The young under-graduates of Cambridge have
made a representation to Longfellow that they are 500 strong and cannot
get one ticket. I don't know what is to be done, but I suppose I must
read there, somehow. We are all in the clouds until I shall have broken
ground in New York." The sale of tickets, there, had begun two days
before the first reading in Boston. "At the New York barriers," he wrote
to his daughter on the first of December, "where the tickets were on
sale and the people ranged as at the Paris theatres, speculators went up
and down offering twenty dollars for any body's place. The money was in
no case accepted. But one man sold two tickets for the second, third,
and fourth nights; his payment in exchange being one ticket for the
first night, fifty dollars (about L7 10_s._), and a 'brandy-cocktail.'"

On Monday the second of December he read for the first time in Boston,
his subjects being the _Carol_ and the _Trial from Pickwick_; and his
reception, from an audience than which perhaps none more remarkable
could have been brought together, went beyond all expectations formed.
"It is really impossible," he wrote to me next morning, "to exaggerate
the magnificence of the reception or the effect of the reading. The
whole city will talk of nothing else and hear of nothing else to-day.
Every ticket for those announced here, and in New York, is sold. All are
sold at the highest price, for which in our calculation we made no
allowance; and it is impossible to keep out speculators who immediately
sell at a premium. At the decreased rate of money even, we had above
L450 English in the house last night; and the New York hall holds 500
people more. Everything looks brilliant beyond the most sanguine hopes,
and I was quite as cool last night as though I were reading at Chatham."
The next nig