hes for the Readings; dressed, and
pocketed my jewels and papers; while the manager stuffed himself out
with money. Meanwhile the police and firemen were in the house tracing
the mischief to its source in a certain fire-grate. By this time the
hose was laid all through from a great tank on the roof, and everybody
turned out to help. It was the oddest sight, and people had put the
strangest things on! After chopping and cutting with axes through
stairs, and much handing about of water, the fire was confined to a
dining-room in which it had originated; and then everybody talked to
everybody else, the ladies being particularly loquacious and cheerful. I
may remark that the second landlord (from both, but especially the
first, I have had untiring attention) no sooner saw me on this agitating
occasion, than, with his property blazing, he insisted on taking me down
into a room full of hot smoke, to drink brandy and water with him! And
so we got to bed again about 2."

Dickens had been a week in New York before he was able to identify the
great city which a lapse of twenty-five years had so prodigiously
increased. "The only portion that has even now come back to me," he
wrote, "is the part of Broadway in which the Carlton Hotel (long since
destroyed) used to stand. There is a very fine new park in the
outskirts, and the number of grand houses and splendid equipages is
quite surprising. There are hotels close here with 500 bedrooms and I
don't know how many boarders; but this hotel is quite as quiet as, and
not much larger than, Mivart's in Brook Street. My rooms are all en
suite, and I come and go by a private door and private staircase
communicating with my bed-room. The waiters are French, and one might be
living in Paris. One of the two proprietors is also proprietor of
Niblo's Theatre, and the greatest care is taken of me. Niblo's great
attraction, the _Black Crook_, has now been played every night for 16
months(!), and is the most preposterous peg to hang ballets on that was
ever seen. The people who act in it have not the slightest idea of what
it is about, and never had; but, after taxing my intellectual powers to
the utmost, I fancy that I have discovered Black Crook to be a malignant
hunchback leagued with the Powers of Darkness to separate two lovers;
and that the Powers of Lightness coming (in no skirts whatever) to the
rescue, he is defeated. I am quite serious in saying that I do not
suppose there are two pages of