CHAPTER XXXIII.
SECOND AMERICAN VISIT.
After the long interval of five-and-twenty years, filled up with many more such volumes and fly-leaves, I called again by pressing invitation on my American constituency, and found them as warm and generous and hospitable as before.

This time I was six months a guest among them,--literally so, for I found myself passed on from home to home, and almost never took my bed at an hotel.

The chief feature of this visit was that I posed everywhere as a public "reader from my own works," and met with generally good success, in spite of the terrific winter weather manfully encountered half the time.

Everybody knows what extremities of cold are endured both in the North-Eastern States and in Canada.

At Baltimore I have seen the snow piled almost man-high on each side of the middle lane dug for the tramway,--in New York men skated to their offices; at Ottawa the thermometer was 25 deg.