For forty years he held the reputation as first in the land as an orator and champion of temperance. He probably delivered more lectures than any man who has lived in the present age. From a carefully kept record we find that from 1842 to 1852 he lectured on an average of 300 times a year, making 3,000 lectures. From 1862 to 1870 he averaged 260 times a year, or 2,080 lectures on temperance. Of these, 1,160 were delivered in Great Britain. After 1870 Mr. Gough lectured on miscellaneous subjects. Each year he prepared a new lecture upon a fresh topic. Among the most taking were: “Eloquence and Orators,” “Peculiar People,” “Fact and Fiction,” “Habit,” “Curiosity,” “Circumstances,” “Will It Pay,” “Now and Then,” “Night Scenes,” “Blunders,” which was his last. From 1861 to the time of his death, February 11, 1886, he delivered 3,526 lectures, making in all 9,600 addresses before 9,000,000 hearers. Mr. Gough was a charming man personally: modest, unassuming, kind-hearted, and sincere, always ready to help a worthy cause or a needy friend. He was a zealous Christian, but he never obtruded his religious belief offensively on others. One needed to see him in his home to know what a devoted Christian he was. John B. Gough was among the heroes of the nineteenth century. The incalculable good he did to his fellow-men can never be known. It is no idle statement when we say that he was the direct means, under God, of raising tens of thousands from degradation to be law-abiding men and women. It was my privilege, in 1879, to see in Mr. Gough’s library four large books containing the names of over 140,000 men, women, and children who, by his own personal efforts, had been induced to sign the pledge. It was the habit of John B. Gough, for forty years, to carry two overcoats on his lecture tours. After his lectures he put both of them on--the first, a light one, which he buttoned up tight, and the second, a very heavy one, a sort of combination of heavy ulster and the regulation overcoat. His two-hour lecture was an unbroken succession of contortions and antics that left him dripping with perspiration. It required all this covering to protect his body from the air before he changed his wet clothing for dry. On his return to his hotel, Mrs. Gough was always in waiting with fresh clothing. A valet at once set to work rubbing him down, exactly as is the custom of grooming a racehorse at the end of the heat. After this process he appeared apparently as fresh as ever. He would eat a bowl of bread and milk, and always wanted an old-fashioned bowl. Mrs. Gough was his constant companion, but did not attend the lectures. During the last twelve years of their travel together she did not hear him once. Gough was a man of the people, the son of a workingman and himself a workingman, self-educated but not what is technically called a scholar. [Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPS]