are. There has
been a great storm here for a few days, and the streets, though wet, are
becoming passable again. Dolby and Osgood are out in it to-day on a
variety of business, and left in grave and solemn state. Scott and the
gasman are stricken with dumb concern, not having received one single
letter from home since they left. What their wives can have done with
the letters they take it for granted they have written, is their stormy
speculation at the door of my hall dressing-room every night.

If I do not send a letter to Katie by this mail, it will be because I
shall probably be obliged to go across the water to Brooklyn to-morrow
to see a church, in which it is proposed that I shall read!!! Horrible
visions of being put in the pulpit already beset me. And whether the
audience will be in pews is another consideration which greatly disturbs
my mind. No paper ever comes out without a leader on Dolby, who of
course reads them all, and never can understand why I don't, in which he
is called all the bad names in (and not in) the language.

We always call him P. H. Dolby now, in consequence of one of these
graceful specimens of literature describing him as the "pudding-headed."

I fear that when we travel he will have to be always before me, so that
I may not see him six times in as many weeks. However, I shall have done
a fourth of the whole this very next week!

Best love to your aunt, and the boys, and Katie, and Charley, and all
true friends.

_Friday._

I managed to read last night, but it was as much as I could do. To-day I
am so very unwell, that I have sent for a doctor; he has just been, and
is in doubt whether I shall not have to stop reading for a while.

[Sidenote: Miss Dickens.]

WESTMINSTER HOTEL, IRVING PLACE, NEW YORK,
_Monday, Dec. 30th, 1867._

I am getting all right again. I have not been well, been very low, and
have been obliged to have a doctor; a very agreeable fellow indeed, who
soon turned out to be an old friend of Olliffe's.[19] He has set me on
my legs and taken his leave "professionally," though he means to give me
a call now and then.

In the library at Gad's is a bound book, "Remarkable Criminal Trials,"
translated by Lady Duff Gordon, from the original by Fauerbach. I want
that book, and a copy of Praed's poems, to be sent out to Boston, care
of Tickn