disappointment, and that a large part of the throng has been
tantalized through the evening in the vain effort to hear--catching a
few words and losing the point of the joke. No wonder they are very
sober, and sail out of the hall very steadily, with an air of thinking
that they have been victims, but also with the plain wish to think as
well of Mr. Charles Dickens as circumstances will allow. Still, they
evidently hold him, upon the whole, responsible, just as an audience
assembled to hear a lecture, and obliged to go unlectured away, holds
the lecturer--chafing in a snow-bank upon the railroad fifty miles
away--responsible for its disappointment. It is pleasant for the
Sealskins to read, as the Easy Chair did the next morning, in the
ever-veracious and independent press, that Mr. Dickens's voice is
heard with ease in every part of the hall.

But let them feel as they may, those who did not hear are sure to go
again, and if they hear the next time, again and again. Let the future
reader of this odd number of a magazine learn further that such was
the popular eagerness to attend these readings that people gathered
before light to stand in the line of the ticket-office. One historic
boy is said to have passed the night in the cold waiting for the
opening of the office, and to have sold his prize for thirty dollars
in gold to "a Southerner." Another person was offered twenty dollars
for his place in the line, with merely a chance of getting a ticket
when his turn came at the office.

The interest was unabated to the end, and under the personal spell of
the enchanter that old ill-feeling towards the author of _American
Notes_ and the creator of Chuzzlewit melted away. And why not? Do we
not all know our Yankee brother of whom Dickens told us, who has a
huge note of interrogation in each eye, and can we blame the