Stanley is one of the most conscientious men I ever knew. While in Boston, after we had been about a week on the tour, the weather was fine and there was beautiful sleighing. Mrs. Stanley and the ladies of our party had come in from a delightful sleigh ride which some friends had tendered. They all looked so rosy and fresh, beaming with delight as they stepped from the sleigh, that we agreed then and there that Mr. Stanley really should lay aside his writing and take a sleigh ride too, behind that spanking four-horse team, and hear the jingle of the hundreds of sleigh bells. I said, “He must come and enjoy it.” Mrs. Stanley said, “Let’s you and I go fetch him.” We rushed up to his room; he was working on his lecture, making some changes, when Mrs. Stanley, with cheeks like roses and charged with oxygen of the outdoor atmosphere, threw her fur-clad arms about his neck, saying: “O, Bulle-me-tal-ie (the name he is known by in Africa), come and have a ride and breathe the most delicious air under heaven. Do come; it will do you so much good and help you for to-night.” After listening to Mrs. Stanley’s eloquent pleadings a moment or two, he rose from his seat and said to me: “Major Pond, you are paying me a fabulous sum for my nightly services. Now it is my duty to do the best I can. If you say you are satisfied with my work as it now is, I will stop and go for a drive.” I could not answer his argument, and he did not take the sleigh ride. From the start until the finish, one hundred and ten lectures, Stanley showed signs of steady improvement. He was good at the start, but shortly became a fine speaker and then a better speaker, and before he had finished he was the best descriptive speaker I ever heard. He had overcome difficulties that would discourage any other man; as Casati wrote of him (Casati, ten years with Emin Pasha in Africa): “Jealous of his own authority, Stanley will not tolerate interference, neither will he take the advice of any one. Difficulties do not discourage him, neither does failure frighten him, as with extraordinary celerity of perception he finds his way out of every embarrassment.”