It was proposed that we adjourn to Madison Square Garden, to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. We occupied two boxes and enjoyed the performance to a late hour. And as it was not in the nature of Stanley to keep his friends waiting up all night, he insisted on a separation then and there, that he might go on board the steamer. As he and I shook hands when we parted, all that he said to me was: “I owe you eighty-nine lectures, which I will deliver if ever I return from Africa.” Stanley went to Africa; three years rolled by, during two years of which no tidings were heard of him or his expedition. Finally the news came--he had reached the goal. Since his departure for Africa I had been non-committal in all of my correspondence for Stanley. I heard that his London agent was booking dates. I was satisfied that if such were the case he was doing it without authority, for no one had had time to hear from him; besides, he was otherwise engaged. His friend Mr. Wellcome, in London, wrote me that he was sure Stanley would not lecture, as he had his book to write; besides, he was such a hero now, and was receiving so much recognition from royalty, that he could not lecture in public, for it would be undignified. The air was full of rumors, but remembering Stanley’s last words, I had not the slightest fear of these rumors. In due time, after the explorer’s arrival in Zanzibar with Emin Pasha, I received a long letter from him, telling me that he had yet to finish his book; that as soon as he got to London he would write me again. He reached there in April, 1890, after an absence of three and a half years. Business took me to London at that time, where I arrived on May 8, 1890. Stanley was the hero of the hour, and his name was on every tongue. Here let me say that at no time had I for one moment a doubt of his safe return to civilization, nor--a matter of much less moment--a single fear that when the time came he would fail me in renewing the broken lecture tour we were engaged in when he was called to take the leadership of the Emin Relief Expedition. This brief statement will serve as a key to the little comedy that followed on my arrival. It was given out that Mr. Stanley would see no one. The book, which he himself considered as his report of the Emin Expedition, was being written, and the publishers naturally were pressing for “copy.” There were other reasons for speech, as was seen when the cruel and strangely sad story of the rear guard had not only to be published, but more fully explained in its tragic features, because a concerted attack on Stanley’s reputation in Great Britain was made. It came about when there was a possibility of its wrecking the lecture tour, which finally grew into the most successful lecture engagement ever made in the United States.