The excitement of the readings continues unabated, the tickets for readings are sold as soon as they are ready, and the public pay treble prices to the speculators who buy them up. They are a wonderfully fine audience, even better than Edinburgh, and almost, if not quite, as good as Paris.
Dolby continues to be the most unpopular man in America (mainly because he can't get four thousand people into a room that holds two thousand), and is reviled in print daily. Yesterday morning a newspaper proclaims of him: "Surely it is time that the pudding-headed Dolby retired into the native gloom from which he has emerged." He takes it very coolly, and does his best. Mrs. Morgan sent me, the other night, I suppose the finest and costliest basket of flowers ever seen, made of white camellias, yellow roses, pink roses, and I don't know what else. It is a yard and a half round at its smallest part.
I must bring this to a close, as I have to go to the hall to try an enlarged background.
Miss Hogarth.
Boston, Sunday, Dec. 22nd, 1867.
Coming here from New York last night (after a detestable journey), I was delighted to find your letter of the 6th. I read it at my ten o'clock dinner with the greatest interest and pleasure, and then we talked of home till we went to bed.
Our tour is now being made out, and I hope to be able to send it in my next letter home, which will be to Mamie, from whom I have not heard (as you thought I had) by the mail that brought out yours. After very careful consideration I have reversed Dolby's original plan, and have decided on taking Baltimore, Washington, Cincinnati, Chicago (!), St. Louis, and a few other places nearer here, instead of staying in New York. My reason is that we are doing immensely, both at New York and here, and that I am sure it is in the peculiar character of the people to prize a thing the more the less easily attainable it is made. Therefore, I want, by absence, to get the greatest rush and pressure upon the five farewell readings in New York in April. All our announced readings are already crammed.
When we got here last Saturday night, we found that Mrs. Fields had not only garnished the rooms with flowers, but also with holly (with real red berries) and festoons of moss dependent from the looking-glasses and picture frames. She is one of the dearest little women in the world. The homely Christmas look of the place quite affected us. Yesterday we dined at her house, and there was a plum-pudding, brought on blazing, and not to be surpassed in any house in England. There is a certain Captain Dolliver, belonging to the Boston Custom House, who came off in the little steamer that brought me ashore from the Cuba. He took it into his head that he would have a piece of English mistletoe brought out in this week's Cunard, which should be laid upon my breakfast-table. And there it was this morning. In such affectionate touches as this, these New England people are especially amiable.
As a general rule, you may lay it down that whatever you see about me in the papers is not true. But although my voyage out was of that highly hilarious description that you first made known to me, you may generally lend a more believing ear to the Philadelphia correspondent of The Times. I don't know him, but I know the source from which he derives his information, and it is a very respectable one.
Did I tell you in a former letter from here, to tell Anne, with her old master's love, that I had seen Putnam, my old secretary? Grey, and with several front teeth out, but I would have known him anywhere. He is coming to "Copperfield" to-night, accompanied by his wife and daughter, and is in the seventh heaven at having his tickets given him.