all, flowed on to the seats over his body,
scratched him, and damaged his best dress suit. All to his unspeakable
joy.

This is a very short letter, but I am going to the Burlington Arcade,
desperately resolved to have all those wonderful instruments put into
operation on my head, with a view to refreshing it.

Kindest love to Georgy and to all.

Ever your affectionate.

[Sidenote: Miss Dickens.]

SHREWSBURY, _Thursday, Aug. 12th, 1858._

A wonderful audience last night at Wolverhampton. If such a thing can
be, they were even quicker and more intelligent than the audience I had
in Edinburgh. They were so wonderfully good and were so much on the
alert this morning by nine o'clock for another reading, that we are
going back there at about our Bradford time. I never saw such people.
And the local agent would take no money, and charge no expenses of his
own.

This place looks what Plorn would call "ortily" dull. Local agent
predicts, however, "great satisfaction to Mr. Dickens, and excellent
attendance." I have just been to look at the hall, where everything was
wrong, and where I have left Arthur making a platform for me out of
dining-tables.

If he comes back in time, I am not quite sure but that he is himself
going to write to Gad's Hill. We talk of coming up from Chester _in the
night to-morrow, after the reading_; and of showing our precious selves
at an apparently impossibly early hour in the Gad's Hill breakfast-room
on Saturday morning.

I have not felt the fatigue to any extent worth mentioning; though I
get, every night, into the most violent heats. We are going to dine at
three o'clock (it wants a quarter now) and have not been here two
hours, so I have seen nothing of Clement.

Tell Georgy with my love, that I read in the same room in which we
acted, but at the end opposite to that where our stage was. We are not
at the inn where the amateur company put up, but at The Lion, where the
fair Miss Mitchell was lodged alone. We have the strangest little rooms
(sitting-room and two bed-rooms all together), the ceilings of which I
can touch with my hand. The windows bulge out over the street, as if
they were little stern-windows in a ship. And a door opens out of the
sitting-room on to a little open gallery with plants in it, where one
leans over a queer old rail, and looks all downhill and slant-wise at
the crookedest black and