in consequence disqualified in a marked
degree for an election. His speech, for volubility and nonsense, was
nearly fatal to us all. We roared and writhed in agonies of laughter,
and the candidates themselves were literally choking and crying with the
humor of the thing. But the fun culminated when I tried to get a hearing
in behalf of my man, and Dickens drowned all my attempts to be heard
with imitative jeers of a boisterous election mob. He seemed to have as
many voices that night as the human throat is capable of, and the
repeated interrupting shouts, among others, of a pretended husky old man
bawling out at intervals, "Three cheers for the bald 'un!" "Down vith
the hairy aristocracy!" "Up vith the little shiny chap on top!" and
other similar outbursts, I can never forget. At last, in sheer
exhaustion, we all gave in, and agreed to break up and thus save our
lives, if it were not already too late to make the attempt.

The extent and variety of Dickens's tones were wonderful. Once he
described to me in an inimitable way a scene he witnessed many years ago
at a London theatre, and I am certain no professional ventriloquist
could have reproduced it better. I could never persuade him to repeat
the description in presence of others; but he did it for me several
times during our walks into the country, where he was, of course,
unobserved. His recital of the incident was irresistibly droll, and no
words of mine can give the _situation_ even, as he gave it. He said he
was once sitting in the pit of a London theatre, when two men came in
and took places directly in front of him. Both were evidently strangers
from the country, and not very familiar with the stage. One of them was
stone deaf, and relied entirely upon his friend to keep him informed of
the dialogue and story of the play as it went on, by having bawled into
his ear, word for word, as near as possible what the actors and
actresses were saying. The man who could hear became intensely
interested in the play, and kept close watch of the stage. The deaf man
also shared in the progressive action of the drama, and rated his friend
soundly, in a loud voice, if a stitch in the story of the play were
inadvertently dropped. Dickens gave the two voices of these two
spectators with his best comic and dramatic power. Notwithstanding the
roars of the audience, for the scene in the pit grew immensely funny to
them as it went on, the deaf man and his friend were too much interes