“Poor old Burbank [at one time Mr. Nye’s “running-mate”], I was about to say, but why should I say that when he is taking a grand old rest after a rather thorny trip? There never lived a more unselfish gentleman than he. He was not brilliant as an originator, perhaps, but he honestly admitted it, and used to the utmost and best all the powers that God gave him. There are mighty few comrades who can go through dark alleys and dangerous stage entrances that are kept locked against the lecturer and only open to the call of the felonious loafer who comes to shift your scenery--only a few comrades, I say, who can go through frosty towns and bitter weather cheerily, as he did--noble old man. And there’s no such test on earth to try a feller’s mettle, is there? I think it’s a good idea to reform and abandon such a life before the hearse is actually at the door waiting for one. I am cheerily preparing to say farewell to these triumphal tours which wreck both soul and body at so much a pair. But I must close and relight my punk. Good-by, old man, and ‘take keer o’ yourself.’ Write to me whenever you are tempted to disobey your physician, and I will promptly respond. “Yours ever, BILL” * * * * * The personality of the professional humorist is often of a very different sort from that which those who know him only through his merry-making would naturally picture. The history of one and another shows that they have turned their bright side to the world, have laughed and joked, and have so bubbled over with humor that they seem to have no serious side--all this with a background of physical disease, or a personal sorrow, that made mental depression inevitable, and to be constantly fought against. Bill Nye, with whom the public smiled for so many years, kept alive his quaint humor in the face of bodily disability under which men of less courage would have succumbed at once. He had a happy spirit, a genuine humor, which can ill be spared. He said no ill-natured or malicious thing in all his writings, and, for one so quick to discover shams, this one fact speaks volumes for the sweetness of his soul. EXPLORERS, TRAVELLERS, AND WAR CORRESPONDENTS [Illustration: HENRY M. STANLEY] HENRY M. STANLEY was engaged by me in the summer of 1886, while travelling in England with Henry Ward Beecher. I was asked if I did not want Henry M. Stanley in America. I replied that Mr. Stanley had once made the attempt, and had been a most dismal failure. A day or two later, when I mentioned this circumstance to Mr. Beecher, he replied: “Get Stanley if you can. He is one of the greatest men we have. I have been reading ‘Through the Dark Continent’; it is a great book. He is doing good work for civilization. He is clean.”