William Dean Howells, Mark Twain always insisted, would be a success on the platform if he would ever consent to go lecturing, and on that recommendation, more than my love for his books, few of which I have ever read, I have used my persuasive eloquence on him more than on any other American author. I had other reasons for importuning Mr. Howells. One was because so many applications had come to me, year after year, from lyceums in all parts of the country, urging me to secure him and expressing wonder that he should refuse. Another was that every visit to the popular novelist increased my faith in the ultimate success of my object. He was always cordial and polite and seemingly pleased that there was so much of a desire on the part of the public to see and hear him, not knowing whether he could entertain them or not. He always seemed to reason very encouragingly from a business standpoint, going into details of probable results from a tour of from fifty to one hundred lectures, as compared with what he could earn by writing during the same length of time. He would like to try it, but there was the risk of health, and of giving up a certainty for what seemed to him an uncertainty. He felt sure that he could prepare a lecture that would please the people and give much information concerning the mysteries of his craft that he could not impart so well in any other way. He was more or less pessimistic concerning himself. Finally there was some prospective change at _Harper’s Weekly_, to which he had regularly contributed so long, and to my delight, in the spring of 1899, he informed me that he would accept my offer, and that I might book fifty engagements for him to lecture, not more than four times a week, and not to go farther west than Kansas or Iowa. I think I never made an announcement that gave me more real inward satisfaction, for in all the years of my pursual of him I had come to learn his painstaking habit of devotion to his work, and that whatever he attempted would be sure of success. When Mark Twain learned that Mr. Howells had at last consented to undertake a lecture tour, he wrote me: * * * * * “I am glad you have corralled Howells. He’s a most sinful man, and I always knew God would send him to the platform if he didn’t behave.” * * * * * He went to his country place in Maine to prepare his lectures. I received frequent letters from him telling me that he was taking easily to the work, and that I might feel satisfied that his lecture would meet the public approval. His first lecture, “The Heroes and Heroines of Fiction,” was given at my house.