or and Fields. If you will give the "Criminal Trials" to Wills,
and explain my wish, and ask him to buy a copy of Praed's poems and add
it to the parcel, he will know how to send the packet out. I think the
"Criminal Trials" book is in the corner book-case, by the window,
opposite the door.

No news here. All going on in the regular way. I read in that church I
told you of, about the middle of January. It is wonderfully seated for
two thousand people, and is as easy to speak in as if they were two
hundred. The people are seated in pews, and we let the pews. I stood on
a small platform from which the pulpit will be removed for the
occasion!! I emerge from the vestry!!! Philadelphia, Baltimore, and
another two nights in Boston will follow this coming month of January.
On Friday next I shall have read a fourth of my whole list, besides
having had twelve days' holiday when I first came out. So please God I
shall soon get to the half, and so begin to work hopefully round.

I suppose you were at the Adelphi on Thursday night last. They are
pirating the bill as well as the play here, everywhere. I have
registered the play as the property of an American citizen, but the law
is by no means clear that I established a right in it by so doing; and
of course the pirates knew very well that I could not, under existing
circumstances, try the question with them in an American court of law.
Nothing is being played here scarcely that is not founded on my
books--"Cricket," "Oliver Twist," "Our Mutual Friend," and I don't know
what else, every night. I can't get down Broadway for my own portrait;
and yet I live almost as quietly in this hotel, as if I were at the
office, and go in and out by a side door just as I might there.

I go back to Boston on Saturday to read there on Monday and Tuesday.
Then I am back here, and keep within six or seven hours' journey of
hereabouts till February. My further movements shall be duly reported as
the details are arranged.

I shall be curious to know who were at Gad's Hill on Christmas Day, and
how you (as they say in this country) "got along." It is exceedingly
cold here again, after two or three quite spring days.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Madame Sainton Dolby.

[18] The nearest neighbour at Higham, and intimate friends.

[19] Dr. Fordyce Barker.

1868.

NARRATIVE.

Charles Dickens remained in America through the winter, returning home
from New York in the _Russia_, on the 19th of April.