air, with many
evidences of the war upon him. He got up to shake hands with me, and
then I found that he had been out on the Prairie with me five-and-twenty
years ago. . . . The papers having referred to my birthday's falling
to-day, my room is filled with most exquisite flowers.[276] They came
pouring in from all sorts of people at breakfast time. The audiences
here are really very fine. So ready to laugh or cry, and doing both so
freely, that you would suppose them to be Manchester shillings rather
than Washington half-sovereigns. Alas! alas! my cold worse than ever."
So he had written too at the opening of his letter.

The first reading had been four days earlier, and was described to his
daughter in a letter on the 4th, with a comical incident that occurred
in the course of it. "The gas was very defective indeed last night, and
I began with a small speech to the effect that I must trust to the
brightness of their faces for the illumination of mine. This was taken
greatly. In the _Carol_ a most ridiculous incident occurred. All of a
sudden, I saw a dog leap out from among the seats in the centre aisle,
and look very intently at me. The general attention being fixed on me, I
don't think anybody saw this dog; but I felt so sure of his turning up
again and barking, that I kept my eye wandering about in search of him.
He was a very comic dog, and it was well for me that I was reading a
comic part of the book. But when he bounced out into the centre aisle
again, in an entirely new place, and (still looking intently at me)
tried the effect of a bark upon my proceedings, I was seized with such a
paroxysm of laughter that it communicated itself to the audience, and we
roared at one another, loud and long." Three days later the sequel came,
in a letter to his sister-in-law. "I mentioned the dog on the first
night here? Next night, I thought I heard (in _Copperfield_) a
suddenly-suppressed bark. It happened in this wise:--One of our people,
standing just within the door, felt his leg touched, and looking down
beheld the dog, staring intently at me, and evidently just about to
bark. In a transport of presence of mind and fury, he instantly caught
him up in both hands, and threw him over his own head, out into the
entry, where the check-takers received him like a game at ball. Last
night he came again, _with another dog_; but our people were so sharply
on the look-out for him that he didn't get in. He had evidently
promised to p