Page:Fitzgerald - Pickwickian manners and customs (1897).djvu/51

 wick' or some other book that the public will listen to?" "Sir," he replied—he must have been of the stock of Silas Wegg—"give me 'Pickwick' in raised characters and I will read it."

The rich old gentleman went his way and inquired at the proper places, but the work was not known. He gave an order for a hundred copies of "Pickwick" in "Wait's Improved Braille Type," and in about six months it was delivered to him—not the whole work, but a selection of the more effective episodes. The blind reader was pleased; the old gentleman insisted on a private rehearsal; select passages were chosen which were calculated to take about twenty minutes each. When he arrived on the morning fixed for the first attempt, he found his friend at his post with quite a crowd gathered round him, in convulsions of laughter. The "poor blind" was reading, or feeling out, old Mr. Weller's ejectment of the red-nosed man. The hat was overflowing with coppers and