ver the ferry
to read." The last of the readings over the ferry was on the day when
this letter was written. "I finished at my church to-night. It is Mrs.
Stowe's brother's, and a most wonderful place to speak in. We had it
enormously full last night (_Marigold_ and _Trial_), but it scarcely
required an effort. Mr. Ward Beecher being present in his pew, I sent to
invite him to come round before he left. I found him to be an
unostentatious, evidently able, straightforward, and agreeable man;
extremely well-informed, and with a good knowledge of art."

Baltimore and Washington were the cities in which he was now, on
quitting New York, to read for the first time; and as to the latter some
doubts arose. The exceptional course had been taken in regard to it, of
selecting a hall with space for not more than 700 and charging everybody
five dollars; to which Dickens, at first greatly opposed, had yielded
upon use of the argument, "you have more people at New York, thanks to
the speculators, paying more than five dollars every night." But now
other suggestions came. "Horace Greeley dined with me last Saturday," he
wrote on the 20th, "and didn't like my going to Washington, now full of
the greatest rowdies and worst kind of people in the States. Last night
at eleven came B. expressing like doubts; and though they may be absurd
I thought them worth attention, B. coming so close on Greeley." Mr.
Dolby was in consequence sent express to Washington with power to
withdraw or go on, as enquiry on the spot might dictate; and Dickens
took the additional resolve so far to modify the last arrangements of
his tour as to avoid the distances of Chicago, St. Louis, and
Cincinnati, to content himself with smaller places and profits, and
thereby to get home nearly a month earlier. He was at Philadelphia on
the 23rd of January, when he announced this intention. "The worst of it
is, that everybody one advises with has a monomania respecting Chicago.
'Good heavens sir,' the great Philadelphia authority said to me this
morning, 'if you don't read in Chicago the people will go into fits!'
Well, I answered, I would rather they went into fits than I did. But he
didn't seem to see it at all."

From Baltimore he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 29th, in the hour's
interval he had to spare before going back to Philadelphia. "It has been
snowing hard for four and twenty hours--though this place is as far
south as Valentia in Spain; and my manager, being