This Monday was our red-letter day in Chicago, when we took in over $4,000, at the matinée and evening reading; this, too, notwithstanding it poured all day and the audience came in carriages and under umbrellas, or dressed in waterproofs, and giving the lobby of Central Music Hall the appearance of a small river. Mrs. Watson was improving all the time, but we left her and Mrs. Pond in Chicago with our friends the McConnells, to join us in Niagara Falls the following Saturday night, where we would spend Sunday and see the falls. Dr. Watson and I went on to Oberlin, Pittsburg, and Cleveland. The strange old Lyceum course in Oberlin is one of the oldest in America, and the Park Hotel is the same old barracks that I have visited year after year with John B. Gough, Beecher, Twain and Cable, Gilmore’s band, Clara Louise Kellogg, and many others. The people of Oberlin gave “Ian Maclaren” a grand ovation. It was the evening of election day, and some of the early election returns were announced at the lecture. It is a time-honored custom in Oberlin that lectures begin at 6:30 in the evening, and invariably open with prayer. “I never before met a people who would pay an admission fee to hear a long prayer,” said the doctor to me after the lecture. Dr. Watson was the guest of the college dean. I would not attempt to describe the impressions made on him while in Oberlin. It is an absolutely teetotal town and all dinners are dry. The election returns had brought the news of a McKinley landslide, and the students’ enthusiasm knew no bounds. They surrounded the dean’s house, where Dr. Watson was stopping, built a number of bonfires, and remained there most of the night, shouting, “What’s the matter with McKinley? _He’s all right!_” Dr. Watson never got over that. The day after the election, when we reached Cleveland, which is only seven miles from McKinley’s home, I doubt if there could be found a person there that day who was not hoarse. I never saw such a litter of débris before or since. The streets were covered with papers, old box and barrel hoop irons, ashes, and embers of bonfires, and hardly a soul was to be seen at ten o’clock in the morning. They were used up. It did look like the break up of a hard winter or the ruins of a burned district. In registering, Dr. Watson asked the clerk of the hotel, “What’s the matter with McKinley?” and he got it good and strong: “_He’s all right!_” Everybody in the room and vicinity shouted. He certainly had entered into the spirit of that contest. Notwithstanding all this excitement, the people had roused up in the evening, and we had about $1,100 in cash in the big Music Hall there.