Educated, trained, and a participant in those early conflicts in Kansas, as I was, with the name of Beecher as a beacon light, one may perhaps be able to realize my feelings of reverence and awe for this great man when I met him for the first time in Brooklyn, in his own house, in April, 1875. I never had experienced such a feeling before. My lips trembled, my tongue seemed paralyzed, my throat clogged, my eyes flooded. I was helpless; I was joyous; so filled to overflowing with something that I must have made a fool of myself. Holding fast to my hand, Mr. Beecher walked over to the sofa in the parlor, set me down, and began questioning me about James Redpath, who had owned the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, in Boston, and for whom Mr. Beecher had lectured. I told him that Mr. Redpath had gone out of the business and had returned to journalism in New York, and that Mr. Hathaway and I had bought out the concern; that a number of engagements for him to lecture had been indefinitely postponed the season before, with a promise on his (Mr. Beecher’s) part that new dates should be given the management as soon as he himself could forecast his own time. Nearly a year had passed, and these people were waiting. To make a long story short, the time was arranged for, and new dates for New England, to begin Monday, April 18, 1875, in New London, Conn. This was the first lecture given by Mr. Beecher under my auspices. From that time until February, 1887, three weeks before his death, Mr. Beecher and I travelled together nearly 300,000 miles. He lectured 1261 times for me. On many of our lecture tours we were favored with Mrs. Beecher’s companionship. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were both good travellers--never the slightest trouble. They carried their own hand baggage, and would allow no outsider to touch it. One little journey we made together, a sort of “vacation excursion.” Mr. Beecher delivered seventy-five lectures on that little circuit of the continent, preached sixteen sermons, many of them in Plymouth churches, and travelled 17,000 miles. I cannot undertake to give a connected, chronological account of even a part of my wonderful experiences with Mr. Beecher. I have simply selected here and there an episode which will serve to illustrate some characteristic of the man I knew. We had returned from Mr. Beecher’s first visit to Nashville and Memphis, in May, 1879. It had been a short tour of unusual interest to him; he had never before been south of Mason and Dixon’s line, except for a single night in Richmond, Va., in 1877. I accompanied him on the tour, and to his first Friday evening prayer-meeting in Plymouth Church after our return, for I was quite certain his people were to be treated to some interesting comments on our journey. I asked Mr. Ellingwood (Mr. Beecher’s stenographer) to take down the “talk” and write it out for me privately, which he did, and here it is--the first time it has ever seen the light of day: [Illustration]