Just as Beecher was closing, a telegram from London was read that "Her Majesty has to-night caused the 'broad arrow' to be placed on the rams in Mr. Laird's yard at Birkenhead." This meant the stoppage of the ships which were building for the South, to destroy our shipping as the Alabama had done. The whole audience rose and cheered, men waving their hats and women their handkerchiefs as they wept. So moved were the people that a big fellow in the gallery, who could not shake hands with Mr. Beecher, cried out, "Shake my umbrella," as he reached it down to the platform. Mr. Beecher did as requested. "By Jocks!" said the man, "nobody sha'n't touch that umbrella again." On Oct. 13 Beecher spoke to an immense audience at Glasgow, telling them that in building ships to destroy free labor in America, "they were driving nails in their own coffins." The interruptions, though great here, were not as bad as at Manchester. The next evening he spoke to a packed house at Edinburgh, being lifted over the people's heads to reach the platform. These speeches were reported verbatim all over England. On Oct. 16 he spoke at the great Philharmonic Hall at Liverpool, at that time the headquarters of Southern sympathies. The meeting was a perfect bedlam. "Three cheers for Jeff Davis" were given every now and then, with cries of "Turn him out!" hisses and yells, till Beecher sat down on the edge of the platform and waited for a calm. For three hours, sentence by sentence, his voice was hurled against a threatening, hooting mob. Four days later Henry Ward Beecher spoke to a dense crowd in Exeter Hall, London. With satire and pathos and burning eloquence, he spoke like one inspired. Dr. William M. Taylor, of the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, said, "I believe there has not been such eloquence in the world since Demosthenes." Dr. Lyman Abbott and the Rev. S. B. Halliday, in their life of Mr. Beecher, say with truth, that "he changed the public sentiment, and so the political course of the nation, and secured and cemented an alliance between the mother country and our own land, which needs no treaties to give it expression, which has been gaining strength ever since, and which no demagogism on this side of the water, and no ignorance and prejudice on that, have been able to impair." The physical strain while in England was great. "I thought at times," he says, "that I should certainly break a blood-vessel or have apoplexy. I did not care; I was willing to die as ever I was, when hungry and thirsty, to take refreshment, if I might die for my country." Mr. Beecher on his return was welcomed with open arms and grateful hearts by the American people. Great receptions were given him at the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, and the Academy of Music, New York.