execution line,—­but after the concert came this beautiful episode.  Barnum hunted me out from the two or three acres of faces,—­because the fair and melodious Jenny had expressed to him an urgent wish to see me.  When I got to her boudoir, where Barnum introduced me, I really thought she would have cried outright,—­as feeling herself a stranger in a foreign land, and in the presence of an old unseen book-friend; for it seems,—­as she told me in beautiful slightly broken English,—­that my poor dear ’Proverbial Philosophy,’—­which I never thought she had seen till I gave it to her,—­has been to her ’such a comfort, such a comfort, many days;’ and she was ‘so glad, so ver glad,’ to see me,—­and she looked so unhappy,—­though the immense hall was still echoing with those tumults of applause,—­and she clasped my hand so often, and would hardly let it go, and made me sit and talk with her, for I was ‘her friend,’ and really seemed like a child clinging to its elder brother.  I was quite sorry to leave her,—­and when, putting aside all idle musical compliments, I tried to cheer her by the thought,—­how nobly and generously for many good purposes she was using the melodious gift of God to her, poor Jenny only looked up devoutly, and shook her head, and sighed, and seemed unhappy.  However, it was time to go, so with another hearty shake-hands, and ‘my love to dear England,’ Jenny Lind and I took leave.  This testimony as to my book’s good use for comfort,—­she will ’read more now she sees me,’—­is very pleasing,—­it is much to do poor Jenny good, who does good to so many others.  I think I’ve forgotten to say that great old Webster, the Secretary of State, avows that he ‘always after hard work refreshes his mind’ with that book:  and—­I might fill volumes with the same sort of thing.  God has blessed my writings to millions of the human race!  And from prince to peasant good has been done through this hand, incalculable.—­God alone be praised.”

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. below zero, and at Montreal