_All the Year Round_ in the whole piece
(which acts all night); the whole of the rest of it being ballets of all
sorts, perfectly unaccountable processions, and the Donkey out of last
year's Covent Garden pantomime! At the other theatres, comic operas,
melodramas, and domestic dramas prevail all over the city, and my
stories play no inconsiderable part in them. I go nowhere, having laid
down the rule that to combine visiting with my work would be absolutely
impossible. . . . The Fenian explosion at Clerkenwell was telegraphed here
in a few hours. I do not think there is any sympathy whatever with the
Fenians on the part of the American people, though political
adventurers may make capital out of a show of it. But no doubt large
sections of the Irish population of this State are themselves Fenian;
and the local politics of the place are in a most depraved condition, if
half of what is said to me be true. I prefer not to talk of these
things, but at odd intervals I look round for myself. Great social
improvements in respect of manners and forbearance have come to pass
since I was here before, but in public life I see as yet but little
change."

He had got through half of his first New York readings when a winter
storm came on, and from this time until very near his return the
severity of the weather was exceptional even for America. When the first
snow fell, the railways were closed for some days; and he described New
York crowded with sleighs, and the snow piled up in enormous walls the
whole length of the streets. "I turned out in a rather gorgeous sleigh
yesterday with any quantity of buffalo robes, and made an imposing
appearance." "If you were to behold me driving out," he wrote to his
daughter, "furred up to the moustache, with an immense white
red-and-yellow-striped rug for a covering, you would suppose me to be of
Hungarian or Polish nationality." These protections nevertheless availed
him little; and when the time came for getting back to Boston, he found
himself at the close of his journey with a cold and cough that never
again left him until he had quitted the country, and of which the
effects became more and more disastrous. For the present there was
little allusion to this, his belief at the first being strong that he
should overmaster it; but it soon forced itself into all his letters.

His railway journey otherwise had not been agreeable. "The railways are
truly alarming. Much worse (because more worn I s