Naturally I had no little curiosity about my traveling companions. Scoffing eastern friends told me that there would be bell ringers, trained dogs, and Tyrolese yodelers. I found no such entertainment, but I could hardly have fallen in with pleasanter company. A quintette of young people whose business it was to sing for three-quarters of an hour before my afternoon lecture and for a like period before the evening entertainment, proved to be the gayest, kindest, healthiest of companions. They were hard workers, seriously interested in pleasing their audiences. They knew not only how to work, but how to live on the kind of junket that I had undertaken. In other words, here was a group of five young people who were doing what to me was very unusual, in a thoroughly professional way. The seventh member of our party, the evening entertainer, Sydney Landon, had had long experience on the circuit. He was doing his work exactly as a good writer or a good lawyer would do his. I saw at once that what I had joined was not, as I had hastily imagined, a haphazard semi-business, semi-philanthropic, happy-go-lucky new kind of barnstorming. It was serious work. In starting the Chautauqua work I was not conscious that there was a large percentage of condescension in my attitude. My first audience revealed my mind to me with painful definiteness, and humbled me beyond expression. It was all so unlike anything that I had had in my mind. I was to speak in the evening and arrived at my destination late and after a rather hard day. It was a steel town—one which I had known long years before. The picturesqueness of the thing struck me with amazement. Planted on an open space in the straggling, dimly lighted streets, where the heavy panting of the blast furnaces could be clearly heard, I saw the tent ablaze with electric lights, for, if you please, we carried our own electric equipment. From all directions men, women, and children were flocking—white shirtwaists in profusion, few coats, and still fewer hats. And there were so many of them! I felt a queer sensation of alarm. Here in the high-banked tiers were scores upon scores of serious faces of hard-working men. I had come to talk about the hopeful and optimistic things that I had seen in the industrial life of the country; but face to face with these men, within sound of the heavy panting of great furnaces, within sight of the unpainted, undrained rows of company houses which I had noticed as I came in on the train, the memory of many a long and bitter labor struggle that I had known of in that valley came to life, and all my pretty tales seemed now terribly flimsy. They were so serious, they listened so intently to get something; and the tragedy was that I had not more to give them. This was my first audience. I never had another that made so deep an impression upon me.