Chapter XXXVI: The Path That Has Been Blazed (2)

But as this man looked into the brook, he leaped off that ash barrel and managed to catch the trout with his fingers, and sent it to Worcester. They wrote back that they would give him a five dollar bill for another such trout as that, not that it was worth that much, but he wished to help the poor man. So this shoemaker and his wife, now perfectly united, that five dollar bill in prospect went out to get another trout They went up the stream to its source and down to the brimming river, but not another trout could they find in the whole stream; and so they came home disconsolate and went to the minister. The minister didn't know how trout grew, but he pointed the way. Said he, "Get Seth Green's book, and that will give you the information you want." They did so, and found all about the culture of trout. They found that a trout lays thirty-six hundred eggs every year and every trout gains a quarter of a pound every year, so that in four years a little trout will furnish four tons per annum to sell to the market at fifty cents a pound. When they found that, they said they didn't believe any such story as that, but if they could get five dollars a piece they could make something. And right in that same back yard with the coal sifter up stream and window screen down the stream, they began the culture of trout. They afterwards moved to the Hudson, and since then he has become the authority in the United States upon the raising of fish, and he has been next to the highest on the United States Fish Commission in Washington. My lesson is that man's wealth was out there in his back yard for twenty years, but he didn't see it until his wife drove him out with a mop stick.

I remember meeting personally a poor carpenter of Hingham, Massachusetts, who was out of work and in poverty. His wife also drove him out of doors. He sat down on the shore and whittled a soaked shingle into a wooden chain. His children quarreled over it in the evening, and while he was whittling a second one, a neighbor came along and said, "Why don't you whittle toys if you can carve like that?" He said, "I don't know what to make!" There is the whole thing. His neighbor said to him: "Why don't you ask your own children?" Said he, "What is the use of doing that? My children are different from other people's children." I used to see people like that when I taught school. The next morning when his boy came down the stairway, he said, "Sam, what do you want for a toy?" "I want a wheel-barrow." When his little girl came down he asked her what she wanted, and she said, "I want a little doll's washstand, a little doll's carriage, a little doll's umbrella," and went on with a whole lot of things that would have taken his lifetime to supply. He consulted his own children right there in his own house and began to whittle out toys to please them. He began with his jack-knife, and made those unpainted Hingham toys. He is the richest man in the entire New England States, if Mr. Lawson is to be trusted in his statement concerning such things, and yet that man's fortune was made by consulting his own children in his own house. You don't need to go out of your own house to find out what to invent or what to make. I always talk too long on this subject.

I would like to meet the great men who are here to-night. The great men! We don't have any great men in Philadelphia. Great men! You say that they all come from London, or San Francisco, or Rome, or Manayunk, or anywhere else but here--anywhere else but Philadelphia--and yet, in fact, there are just as great men in Philadelphia as in any city of its size. There are great men and women in this audience. Great men, I have said, are very simple men. Just as many great men here as are to be found anywhere. The greatest error in judging great men is that we think that they always hold an office. The world knows nothing of its greatest men. Who are the great men of the world? The young man and young woman may well ask the question. It is not necessary that they should hold an office, and yet that is the popular idea. That is the idea we teach now in our high schools and common schools, that the great men of the world are those who hold some high office, and unless we change that very soon and do away with that prejudice, we are going to change to an empire. There is no question about it. We must teach that men are great only on their intrinsic value, and not on the position that they may incidentally happen to occupy. And yet, don't blame the young men saying that they are going to be great when they get into some official position. I ask this audience again who of you are going to be great? Says a young man: "I am going to be great" "When are you going to be great?" "When I am elected to some political office," Won't you learn the lesson, young man; that it is _prima facie_ evidence of littleness to hold public office under our form of government? Think of it. This is a government of the people, and by the people, and for the people, and not for the office-holder, and if the people in this country rule as they always should rule, an officeholder is only the servant of the people, and the Bible says that "the servant cannot be greater than his master," The Bible says that "he that is sent cannot be greater than him who sent him." In this country the people are the masters, and the office-holders can never be greater than the people; they should be honest servants of the people, but they are not our greatest men. Young man, remember that you never heard of a great man holding any political office in this country unless he took that office at an expense to himself. It is a loss to every great man to take a public office in our country. Bear this in mind, young man, that you cannot be made great by a political election. Another young man says, "I am going to be a great man in Philadelphia some time." "Is that so? When are you going to be great?" "When there comes another war! When we get into difficulty with Mexico, or England, or Russia, or Japan, or with Spain again over Cuba, or with New Jersey, I will march up to the cannon's mouth, and amid the glistening bayonets I will tear down their flag from its staff, and I will come home with stars on my shoulders, and hold every office in the gift of the government, and I will be great." "No, you won't! No, you won't; that is no evidence of true greatness, young man." But don't blame that young man for thinking that way; that is the way he is taught in the high school. That is the way history is taught in college. He is taught that the men who held the office did all the fighting.

I remember we had a Peace Jubilee here in Philadelphia soon after the Spanish war. Perhaps some of those visitors think we should not have had it until now in Philadelphia, and as the great procession was going up Broad street I was told that the tally-ho coach stopped right in front of my house, and on the coach was Hobson, and all the people threw up their hats and swung their handkerchiefs, and shouted "Hurrah for Hobson!" I would have yelled too, because he deserves much more of his country than he has ever received. But suppose I go into the High School to-morrow and ask, "Boys, who sunk the Merrimac?" If they answer me "Hobson," they tell me seven-eighths of a lie--seven-eighths of a lie, because there were eight men who sunk the Merrimac. The other seven men, by virtue of their position, were continually exposed to the Spanish fire, while Hobson, as an officer, might reasonably be behind the smoke-stack. Why, my friends, in this intelligent audience gathered here to-night I do not believe I could find a single person that can name the other seven men who were with Hobson. Why do we teach history in that way? We ought to teach that however humble the station a man may occupy, if he does his full duty in his place, he is just as much entitled to the American peopled honor as is a king upon a throne. We do teach it as a mother did her little boy in Now York when he said, "Mamma, what great building is that?" "That is General Grant's tomb." "Who was General Grant?" "He was the man who put down the rebellion." Is that the way to teach history?

Do you think we would have gained a victory if it had depended on General Grant alone? Oh, no. Then why is there a tomb on the Hudson at all? Why, not simply because General Grant was personally a great man himself, but that tomb is there because he was a representative man and represented two hundred thousand men who went down to death for their nation and many of them as great as General Grant. That is why that beautiful tomb stands on the heights over the Hudson.

I remember an incident that will illustrate this, the only one that I can give to-night. I am ashamed of it, but I don't dare leave it out. I close my eyes now; I look back through the years to 1863; I can see my native town in the Berkshire Hills, I can see that cattle-show ground filled with people; I can see the church there and the town hall crowded, and hear bands playing, and see flags flying and handkerchiefs steaming--well do I recall at this moment that day. The people had turned out to receive a company of soldiers, and that company came marching up on the Common. They had served out one term in the Civil War and had re-enlisted, and they were being received by their native townsmen. I was but a boy, but I was captain of that company, puffed out with pride on that day--why, a cambric needle would have burst me all to pieces. As I marched on the Common at the head of my company, there was not a man more proud than I. We marched into the town hall and then they seated my soldiers down in the center of the house and I took my place down on the front seat, and then the town officers filed through the great throng of people, who stood close and packed in that little hall. They came up on the platform, formed a half circle around it, and the mayor of the town, the "chairman of the Select men" in Kew England, took his seat in the middle of that half circle, He was an old man, his hair was gray; he never held an office before in his life. He thought that an office was all he needed to be a truly great man, and when he came up he adjusted his powerful spectacles and glanced calmly around the audience with amazing dignity. Suddenly his eyes fell upon me, and then the good old man came right forward and invited me to come up on the stand with the town officers. Invited me up on the stand! No town officer ever took notice of me before I went to war. Now, I should not say that. One town officer was there who advised the teacher to "whale" me, but I mean no "honorable mention." So I was invited up on the stand with the town officers. I took my seat and let my sword fall on the floor, and folded my arms across my breast and waited to be received. Napoleon the Fifth! Pride goeth before destruction and a fall. When I had gotten my seat and all became silent through the hall, the chairman of the Select men arose and came forward with great dignity to the table, and we all supposed he would introduce the Congregational minister, who was the only orator in the town, and who would give the oration to the returning soldiers. But, friends, you should have seen the surprise that ran over that audience when they discovered that this old farmer was going to deliver that oration himself. He had never made a speech in his life before, but he fell into the same error that others have fallen into, he seemed to think that the office would make him an orator. So he had written out a speech and walked up and down the pasture until he had learned it by heart and frightened the cattle, and he brought that manuscript with him, and taking it from his pocket, he spread it carefully upon the table. Then he adjusted his spectacles to be sure that he might see it, and walked far back on the platform and then stepped forward like this. He must have studied the subject much, for he assumed an elocutionary attitude; he rested heavily upon his left heel, slightly advanced the right foot, threw back his shoulders, opened the organs of speech, and advanced his right hand at an angle of forty-five. As he stood in that elocutionary attitude this is just the way that speech went, this is it precisely. Some of my friends have asked me if I do not exaggerate it, but I could not exaggerate it. Impossible! This is the way it went; although I am not here for the story but the lesson that is back of it:

"Fellow citizens." As soon as he heard his voice, his hand began to shake like that, his knees began to tremble, and then he shook all over. He coughed and choked and finally came around to look at his manuscript. Then he began again: "Fellow citizens: We--are--we are--we are--we are--We are very happy--we are very happy--we are very happy--to welcome back to their native town these soldiers who have fought and bled--and come back again to their native town. We are especially--we are especially--we are especially--we are especially pleased to see with us to-day this young hero (that meant me)--this young hero who in imagination (friends, remember, he said "imagination," for if he had not said that, I would not be egotistical enough to refer to it)--this young hero who, in imagination, we have seen leading his troops--leading--we have seen leading--we have seen leading his troops on to the deadly breach. We have seen his shining--his shining--we have seen his shining--we have seen his shining--his shining sword--flashing in the sunlight as he shouted to his troops, 'Come on!'"

Oh, dear, dear, dear, dear! How little that good, old man knew about war. If he had known anything about war, he ought to have known what any soldier in this audience knows is true, that it is next to a crime for an officer of infantry ever in time of danger to go ahead of his men. I, with my shining sword flashing in the sunlight, shouting to my troops: "Come on." I never did it. Do you suppose I would go ahead of my men to be shot in the front by the enemy and in the back by my own men? That is no place for an officer. The place for the officer is behind the private soldier in actual fighting. How often, as a staff officer, I rode down the line when the Rebel cry and yell was coming out of the woods, sweeping along over the fields, and shouted, "Officers to the rear! Officers to the rear!" and then every officer goes behind the line of battle, and the higher the officer's rank, the farther behind he goes. Not because he is any the less brave, but because the laws of war require that to be done. If the general came up on the front line and were killed you would lose your battle anyhow, because he has the plan of the battle in his brain, and must be kept in comparative safety. I, with my "shining sword flashing in the sunlight." Ah! There sat in the hall that day men who had given that boy their last hardtack, who had carried him on their backs through deep rivers. But some were not there; they had gone down to death for their country. The speaker mentioned them, but they were but little noticed, and yet they had gone down to death for their country, gone down for a cause they believed was right and still believe was right, though I grant to the other side the same that I ask for myself. Yet these men who had actually died for their country were little noticed, and the hero of the hour was this boy. Why was he the hero? Simply because that man fell into that same foolishness. This boy was an officer, and those were only private soldiers. I learned a lesson that I will never forget. Greatness consists not in holding some office; greatness really consists in doing some great deed with little means, in the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private ranks of life; that is true greatness. He who can give to this people better streets, better homes, better schools, better churches, more religion, more of happiness, more of God, he that can be a blessing to the community in which he lives to-night will be great anywhere, but he who cannot be a blessing where he now lives will never be great anywhere on the face of God's earth. "We live in deeds, not years, in feeling, not in figures on a dial; in thoughts, not breaths; we should count time by heart throbs, in the cause of right." Bailey says: "He most lives who thinks most."

If you forget everything I have said to you, do not forget this, because it contains more in two lines than all I have said. Bailey says: "He most lives who thinks most, who feels the noblest, and who acts the best."

"PERSONAL GLIMPSES OF CELEBRATED MEN AND WOMEN."[A]

[Footnote A: Stenographic report by A. Russell Smith, Sec'y.]

When I had been lecturing forty years, which is now four years ago, the Lecture Bureau suggested that before I retire from the public platform, that I should prepare one subject and deliver it through the country. For I had told the Bureau thirty years ago that when I had lectured forty years, I would retire. They therefore suggested a talk on this topic, "Personal Glimpses of Celebrated Men and Women." But a death in our family which destroyed the homeness of our house produced such an effect upon us that after the forty years came we found that we would rather wander than stay at home, and consequently we are traveling still, and will do so until the end. This explanation will show why many of these things are said. For I must necessarily bring myself often into this topic, sometimes unpleasantly to myself. Mark Twain says, that the trouble with an old man is that he "remembers so many things that ain't so," and with Mark Twain's caution in my ears, I will try to give you these "Personal Glimpses of Celebrated Men and Women."

I do not claim to be a very intimate friend of great men. But a fly may look at an elephant, and for this reason we may glance at the great men and women whom I have seen through the many years of public life. Sometimes those glimpses give us a better idea of the real man or woman than an entire biography written while he was living would do; and to-night as a grandfather would bring his grandchildren to his knee and tell them of his little experiences, so let me tell to you these incidents in a life now so largely lived out.

As I glance back to the Hampshire Highlands of the dear old Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts, where my father worked as a farmer among the rooks for twenty years to pay off a mortgage of twelve hundred dollars upon his little farm, my elder brother and myself slept in the attic which had one window in the gable end, composed of four lights and those very small. I remember that attic so distinctly now, with the ears of corn hung by the husks on the bare rafters, the rats running over the floor and sometimes over the faces of the boys; the patter of the rain upon the roof, and the whistle of the wind around that gable end, the sifting of the snows through the hole in the window over the pillow on our bed. While these things may appear very simple and homely before this great audience, yet I mention them because in this house I had a glimpse of the first great man I ever saw. It was far in the country, far from the railroad, far from the city, yet into that region there came occasionally a man or woman whose name is a household word in the world. In those mountains of my boyhood there was then an "underground railroad" running from Virginia to Canada. It was called an "underground railroad," although it was a system by which the escaped slaves from Virginia came into Delaware, from Delaware into Philadelphia, then to New York, then to Springfield, and from Springfield my father took the slaves by night to Worthington, Mass., and they were sent on by St. Albans, over the Canada line into liberty. This "underground railroad" system was composed of a chain of men of whom my father was one link. One night my father drove up in the dark, and my elder brother and I looked out to see who it was he had! brought home with him. We supposed he had brought a slave whom he was helping to escape. Oh, those dreary, dark days, when we were in continual dread lest the United States Marshal should arrest my father, throw him into prison for thus assisting these fugitive slaves. The gloomy memory of those early years chills me now. But as we gazed out that dark night, we saw that it was a white man with father and who helped unhitch the horses and put them in the barn. In the morning this white man sat at the breakfast table and my father introduced him to us, saying: "Boys, this is Frederick Douglass, the great colored orator," While I looked at him, giggling as boys will do, Mr. Douglass turned to us and said, "Yes, boys, I am a colored man; my mother was a colored woman and my father a white man," and said he, "I have never seen my father, and I do not know much about my mother. I remember her once when she interfered between me and the overseer, who was whipping me, and she received the lash upon her cheek and shoulder, and her blood ran across my face. I remember washing her blood from my face and clothes." That story made a deep impression on us boys, stamped indelibly on our memories. Frederick Douglass is thus mentioned to illustrate the subject that I have come to teach to-night. He frequently came to our house after that and my mother often said to him, "Mr. Douglass, you will work yourself to death," but he replied that until the slaves were free, and that would be very soon, he must devote his life to them. But after that, said he, "I will retire to Rochester, New York, where I have some land and will build a house." He told us how many rooms it would have, what decorations would be there, but when the war had been over several years, he came to the house again and my father asked him about the house in Rochester. "Well," he said, "I have not built that one yet, but I have my plans for it. I have some work yet to do; I must take care of the freedmen in the South, and look after their financial prosperity, then I will build my cottage." You all remember that he never built his house, but suddenly went on into the unknown of the greatest work of his life.

I remember that in 1852, my father came with another man who was put for the night into the northwest bedroom--this is the room where those New Englanders always put their friends, because, perhaps, pneumonia comes there first--that awful, cold, dismal, northwest bedroom. Thinking a favorite uncle had come, I went to the door early in the morning. The door was shut--one of those doors which, if you lift the latch, the door immediately swings open. I lifted the latch and prepared to leap in to awaken my uncle and astonish him by my early morning greeting. But when the door swung back, I glanced toward the bed. The astonishment chills me at this moment, for in that bed was not my uncle; but a giant, whose toes stood up at the foot-board, and whose long hair was spread out over the pillow and his long gray whiskers lay on the bed clothes, and oh, that snore--it sounded like some steam horn. That giant figure frightened me and I rushed out into the kitchen and said, "Mother, who is that strange man in the northwest bed room?" and she said, "Why, that is John Brown." I had never seen John Brown before, although my father had been with him in the wool business in Springfield. I had heard some strange things about John Brown, and the figure of the man made them seem doubly terrible. I hid beside my mother, where I said I would stay until the man was through his breakfast, but father came out and demanded that the boys should come in, and he set me right under the wing of that awful giant. But when John Brown saw us coming in so timidly, he turned to us with a smile so benign and beautiful and so greatly in contrast to what we had pictured him, that it was a transition. He became to us boys one of the loveliest men we ever knew. He would go to the barn with us and milk the cows, pitch the hay from the hay-mow; he drove the cattle to water for us, and told us many a story, until the dear, good old man became one of the treasurers of our life. It is true that my mother thought he was half crazy, and consequently she and father did not always agree about him, and did not discuss him before the children. But nevertheless, be he a crank, or a fanatic, or what he may, one thing is sure, the richest milk of human kindness flowed from that heart and devoted itself sincerely to the uplift of humanity. I remember him with love, love deep and sacred, up to this present time. However great an extremist John Brown was, there were many of them in New England. Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown never could agree. John Brown used to criticise Wendell Phillips severely. He said that Wendell Phillips could not see to read the clearest signs of revolution, and he was reminded by the husband who bought a grave-stone that had been carved for another woman, but the stone-cutter said "That has the name of another person." "Oh," said the widower, "that makes no difference; my wife couldn't read." John Brown once said of Wm. Lloyd Garrison that he couldn't see the point and was like the woman who never could see a joke. One morning, seated at the breakfast table, her husband cracked a joke, but she did not smile, when he said, "Mary, you could not see a joke if it were fired at you from a Dalgreen gun," whereupon she remarked: "Now John, you know they do not fire jokes out of a gun." Well do I recall that December 2d of 1859. Only a few weeks before John Brown came to our house and my father subscribed to the purchase of rifles to aid in the attempt to raise the insurrection among the slaves. The last time I saw John Brown he was in the wagon with my father. Father gave him the reins and came back as though he had forgotten something. John Brown said, "Boys, stay at home; stay at home! Now, remember, you may never see me again," and then in a lower voice, "And I do not think you ever will see me again," but "Remember the advice of your Uncle Brown (as we called him), and stay at home with the old folks, and remember that you will be more blessed here than anywhere else on earth." The happiest place on earth for me is still at my old home in Litchfield, Connecticut. I did not understand him then, but on December 2d at eleven o'clock my father called us all into the house and all that hour from eleven to twelve o'clock we sat there in perfect silence. As the old clock in that kitchen struck eleven, I heard the bell, ring from the Methodist Church, its peal coming up the valley, from hill to hill, and echoing its sad tone as the hour wore on. The peal of that bell remains with me now; it has ever been a source of inspiration to me. Sixty times struck that old bell. Once a minute, and when the long sad hour was over, father put his Bible upon the mantel and went slowly out, and we all solemnly followed, going to our various duties. That solemn hour had a voice in the coming great Civil War of 1861-65. At that hour John Brown was hanged in Virginia. All through New England, they kept that hour with the same solemn services which characterized my father's family. When the call came for volunteers the young men of New England enlisted in the army, and sang again and again, that old song, "John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on." His soul is still marching on. And while I am one of those who would be the first to resist any attempt to mar the sweet fraternity that now characterises the feeling between the North and South, as I believe that the Southern soldier fought for what he believed to be right, and consequently is entitled to our fraternal respect, and while I believe that John Brown was sometimes a fanatic, yet this illustration teaches us this great lesson and that John Brown's advice was true. His happiest days were passed far back in the quiet of his old home.

Near to our home, in the town of Cummington, lived William Cullen Bryant, one of the great poets of New England. He came back there to spend his summers among the mountains he so clearly loved. He promised the people of Cummington that he would again make his permanent home there. I remember asking him if he would come clown to the stream where he wrote "Thanatopsis" and recite it for us. The good, old neighbor, white haired and trembling, came down to the banks of that little stream and stood in the shade of the same old maple where he had written that beautiful poem, and read from the wonderful creation that made his name famous.

"So live that when thy summons comes, to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each must take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."

"Yes," he said, "I will come back to Cummington." So he went to Europe but came not back to occupy that home. He loved the old home. We were driving by his place one day when we saw him planting apple trees in July. We all know that apple trees won't grow when planted in July, so my father, knowing him well, called to him and said, "Mr. Bryant, what are you doing there? They won't grow." Mr. Bryant paused a moment and looked at us, and then said half playfully: "Conwell, drive on, you have no part nor lot in this matter. I do not expect these trees to grow; I am setting them out because I want to live over again the days when my father used to set trees when they would grow. I want to renew that memory." He was wise, for in his work on "The Transmigration of Races" he used that experience wonderfully.

In 1860, when we were teaching school, my elder brother and myself, in Blanchford, Massachusetts, were asked to go to Brooklyn with the body of a lady who died near our schools. We went to Brooklyn on Saturday and after the funeral, our friends asked us to stay over Sunday, saying that they would take us to hear Henry Ward Beecher! That was a great inducement, because my father read the "Tribune" every Sunday morning after his Bible (and sometimes before it) and what Henry Ward Beecher said, my father thought, "was law and Gospel." Sunday night, we went to Plymouth Church, and there was a crowd an hour before the service, and when the doors were opened we were crowded up the stairs. We boys were thrust back into a dirty corner where we could not see. Oh, yes, that is the way they treat the boys, put them any place--they're only boys! I remember the disappointment of that night, when we went there more to see than hear. But finally Mr. Beecher came out and gave out his text. I remember that I did not pay very much attention to it. In the middle of the sermon Mr. Beecher began in the strangest way to auction off a woman: "How much am I offered for the woman?" he yelled, and while in his biographies, they have said that this woman was sold in the Broadway Tabernacle, but I afterwards asked Mrs. Beecher and she said that Mr. Beecher had not sold this woman twice, so far as she knew, but that she recalled distinctly the sale in the Plymouth Church. I remember standing up on tip-toes to look for that woman that was being sold. After he had finished, after the singing of the hymn, he said "Brethren, be seated," and then said, "Sam, come here." A colored boy came up tremblingly and stood beside him. "This boy is offered for $770.00; he is owned in South Carolina and has run away. His master offers him to me for $770.00, and now if the officers of the church will pass the plates the boy shall be set free," and when the plates were returned over $1700.00 came in. As we went our way home I said to my elder brother: "Oh, what a grand thing it must be to preach to a congregation of fifteen hundred people." But my elder brother very wisely said: "You don't know anything about it; you do not know whether he is happy or not." "Well," I suggested, "wasn't it a strange thing to introduce a public auction in the middle of a sermon," and my elder brother again said that if they did more of that in a country church they would have a larger congregation. Afterwards I was quite fortunate to know Mr. Beecher and frequently reported his sermons. I often heard him say that the happiest years he ever knew were back in Lawrenceville, Ohio, in that little church where there were no lamps and he had to borrow them himself, light them himself, and prepare the church for the first service. He told how he swept the church, lighted the fire in the stove, and how it smoked; then how he sawed the wood to heat the church, and how he went into carpenter work to earn money to pay his own salary, yet he said that was the happiest time of his life. Mrs. Beecher told me afterwards that Mr. Beecher often talked about those days and said that bye and bye he would retire and they would again go back to the simple life they had enjoyed so much.

When he had built his new home near the Hudson, Robert Collier and I visited him. We found in the rear of an addition that clap-boards had been put up in all sorts of adjustment. Mr. Collier asked him: "Where did you find a carpenter to do such poor work as that?" and Mr. Beecher said humorously: "You could not hire that carpenter on your house." Then he said: "Mr. Collier, I put those boards on that house myself. I insisted that they leave that work for me to do. I have been happy putting on these boards and driving these nails. They took me back to the old days at Lawrenceville, where we lived over a store and our pantry was a dry goods box. But there we were so happy. I am hoping sometime to be as happy again, but it is not possible to do it while I am in the service of the public." He had promised himself and his wife some day to go back to that simple life. But his sudden death taught the same great lesson with all the examples I give of great men and women. Rev. Robt. Collier always enjoyed the circus--the circus was the great place of enjoyment outside, perhaps, of his pulpit work. It was Robert Collier who used to tell the story of the boy whose aunt always made him go to church, but after going to a circus he wrote to his aunt: "Auntie, if you had ever been to a circus, you wouldn't go to another prayer-meeting as long as you live." The love of Collier for the circus only shows the simplicity of the great man's mind. Mr. Collier is said to have paid a dollar for a fifty cent ticket to the circus, only making it conditional that he was to have the privilege of going 'round to the rear and crawling under the tent, showing what he must have done when a boy. The fact of Mr. Collier's love for the circus was one of the strange things in the eccentricities of a great man's life. Once Mr. Barnum came into Mr. Collier's church and Mr. Collier said to the usher: "Please show Mr. Barnum to a front seat for he always gives me one in _his_ circus." These simplicities often show that somewhere back in each man's life there is a point where happiness and love are one, and when, that point is passed, we go on longing to the return.

The night after he went to hear Henry Ward Beecher's great sermon they persuaded us to stay until the following Monday night, because there was to be a lecture at the Cooper Institute and there was to be a parade of political clubs, and fire works, so as country boys, easily influenced, we decided that the school could wait for another day, and staid for the procession. We went to Cooper's Institute and there was a crowd as there was at Beecher's church. We finally got on the stairway and far in the rear of the great crowd, but my brother stood on the floor, and I sat on the ledge of the window sill, with my feet on his shoulders, so he held me while I told him down there what was going on over yonder. The first man that came on the platform, and presided at that meeting, was William Cullent Bryant, our dear old neighbor. When we boys in a strange city saw that familiar face, oh, the emotions that arose in our hearts! How proud we were at that hour, that he, our neighbor, was presiding on that occasion. He took his seat on the stage, the right of which was left vacant for some one yet to come. Next came a very heavy man, but immediately following him a tall, lean man. Mr. Bryant arose and went toward him, bowing and smiling. He was an awkward specimen of a man and all about me people were asking "Who is that?" but no man seemed to know. I asked a gentleman who that man was, but he said he didn't know. He was an awkward specimen indeed; one of the legs of his trousers was up about two inches above his shoe; his hair was dishevelled and stuck out like rooster's feathers; his coat was altogether too large for him in the back, his arms much longer than the sleeves, and with his legs twisted around the rungs of the chair, was the picture of embarrassment. When Mr. Bryant arose to introduce the speaker of that evening, he was known seemingly to few in that great hall. Mr. Bryant said: "Gentlemen of New York, you have your favorite son in Mr. Seward and if he were to be President of the United States, every one of us would be proud of him." Then came great applause. "Ohio has her favorite son in Judge Wade; and the nation would prosper under his administration, but Gentlemen of New York, it is a great honor that is conferred upon me to-night, for I can introduce to you the next President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln." Then through that audience flew the query as to whom Abraham Lincoln was. There was but weak applause. Mr. Lincoln had in his hand a manuscript. He had written it with great care and exactness and the speech which you read in his biography is the one that he wrote, not the one that he delivered as I recall it, and it is fortunate for the country that they did print the one that he wrote. I think the one he wrote had already been set up in type that afternoon from his manuscript, and consequently they did not go over it to see whether it had been changed or not. He had read three pages and had gone on to the fourth when he lost his place and then he began to tremble and stammer. He then turned it over two or three times, threw the manuscript upon the table, and, as they say in the west, "let himself go." Now the stammering man who had created only silent derision up to that point, suddenly flashed out into an angel of oratory and the awkward arms and dishevelled hair were lost sight of entirely in the wonderful beauty and lofty inspiration of that magnificent address. The great audience immediately began to follow his thought, and when he uttered that quotation from Douglass, "It is written on the sky of America that the slaves shall some day be free," he had settled the question that he was to be the next President of the United States. The applause was so-great that the building trembled and I felt the windows shake behind me. Afterward, as we walked home, I said to my elder brother again, "Wasn't it a great thing to be introduced to all those people as the next President of the United States?" and my elder brother very wisely said: "You do not know whether he was really happy or not." Afterwards, in 1864, when one of my soldiers was unjustly sentenced and his gray-haired mother plead with me to use what influence I would have with the President, I went to Washington and told the story to the President. He said he had heard something about it from Mr. Stanton, and he said he would investigate the matter, and he did afterward decide that the man should not be put to death. At the close of that interview I said to the President: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Lincoln, but is it not a most exhausting thing to sit here hearing all these appeals and have all of this business on your hands?" He laid his head on his hand, and in a somewhat wearied manner, said, with a deep sigh: "Yes, yes; no man ought to be ambitious to be President of the United States," and said he, "When this war is over, and that won't be very long, I tell my "Tad" that we will go back to the farm where I was happier as a boy when I dug potatoes at twenty-five cents a day than I am now; I tell him I will buy him a mule and a pony and he shall have a little cart and he shall make a little garden in a field all his own," and the President's face beamed as he arose from his chair in the delight of excitement as he said: "Yes, I will be far happier than I have ever been here." The next time I looked in the face of Abraham Lincoln was in the east room of the White House at Washington as he lay in his coffin. Not long ago at a Chautauqua lecture I was on the very farm which he bought at Salem, Illinois, and looked around the place where he had resolved to build a mansion, but which was never constructed.

Near my home in the Berkshires, Charles Dudley Warner was born. When he had accomplished great things in literature and had written "My Summer in a Garden," that popular work which attracted the attention of his newspaper friends, he went to Hartford, where the latter gave him a banquet. I was invited to attend and report it for the public press. They lauded him and said how beautiful it was to be so elevated above his fellow men, and how great he was in the estimation of the world But he in his answer to the toast said, "Gentlemen, I wish for no fame, I desire no glory and you have made a mistake if you think I enjoy any such notoriety. I envy the Hartford teacher whose smile threw sunshine along her pathway." Then he told us the story of a poor little boy, cold and barefooted, standing on the street on a terribly cold day. A lady came along, and looking kindly at him, said, "Little boy, are you cold?" The little fellow, looking up into her face, said, "Yes Ma'am, I was cold till you smiled." He would rather have a smile like that and the simple love of his fellow men than to have all the fame of the earth. He was honored in all parts of the world by the greatest of the great, yet he was a sad man when he wrote "My Summer in a Garden," and it all seems a mystery how he could in such grief have written that remarkable little tale. This sadness is often associated with humorists. Mr. Shaw was one of the saddest men I ever met. Why, he cried on the slightest occasion. I went one day to interview him in Boston, and Mr. Shepard, his publisher, said "Please don't trouble Josh Billings now." "What is the matter?" "Oh, he is crying again," said Mr. Shepard. I asked him how Mr. Shaw could write such funny things as he did. He then showed me the manuscript (which Mr. Shaw had just placed on his desk and which he had just written), in which he says, "I do not know any cure for laziness, but I have known a second wife to hurry it up some." Artemus Ward wrote the most laughable things while his heart was in the deepest wretchedness. Often these glimpses of the funny men whose profession would seem to show them to be the happiest of earth's people, prove that they are sometimes the most gloomy and miserable.

John B. Gough, the great temperance orator, the greatest the world has ever seen, said to me one evening at his home that he would lecture for forty years, and then would stop. But his wife said, "Now, John, you know you won't give it up." He assented, "Yes, I will." But his wife said, "No you won't. You men when you drink of public life find it like a drink of whiskey, and you are just like the rest of the men." "No," said he. Then Mr. Gough told again his familiar story of the minister who was preaching in his pulpit in Boston when he saw the Governor of the State coming up the aisle. Immediately he began to stammer, and finally said: "I see the Governor coming in, and as I know you will want to hear an exhortation from him, I think that I had better stop." Then one of the old officials leaped up from one of the front seats and said, "I insist upon your going on with your sermon, sir; you ought not be embarrassed by the Governor's coming in. We are all worms! All worms! nothing but worms!" Then the minister was angry and shouted: "Sir, I would have you understand that there is a difference in worms." Mr. Gough said he was different from other people yet the years came and went, and he stayed on the public platform. One night a committee from Frankford, Philadelphia, asked me to write him and ask him to lecture for them. I wrote and whether my influence had anything to do with it or not, I do not know, but he came from New York and when he was in about the middle of his lecture, he came to that sentence, "Young man, keep your record clear, for a single glass of intoxicating liquor may somewhere, in after years, change into a horrid monster that shall carry you down to woe." And when he had uttered that wonderful sentence of advice, he slopped to get breath, reached for a drink of water, swung forward and fell over. The doctor said he was too late for any earthly aid, and John B. Gough, with his armor on, went on into Glory. He never found that earthly rest he had promised himself. His garden never showed its flowers, and his fields were never strewn with grain.