It was in October, 1881, that the Prime Minister came to Leeds to thank us for his election in the previous year. Among the many political meetings, or series of meetings, that I remember, I can call to mind none like this. For weeks before the event we of the Liberal Committee were engaged in preparing for it. Mr. Gladstone was to arrive on the Thursday evening, and to leave on Saturday evening. Into the forty-eight hours of his visit a series of engagements was packed to which a week might well have been devoted. On the first evening he was formally welcomed to the town, which had been decorated for the occasion as though for a royal visit. Afterwards a large dinner party was held at the residence of his host, Mr. (now Sir James) Kitson. On the Friday he received an address from the Mayor and Corporation, and another from the Chamber of Commerce, to both of which he replied in speeches of some length. A little later in the day a great meeting was held in the Victoria Hall, at which addresses were presented to him from all the Liberal Associations of Yorkshire, and he responded in a very fine speech that lasted an hour. In the evening he attended a great banquet at which thirteen hundred persons sat down to dinner in a noble hall specially erected for the occasion, whilst the day's work ended with a vast torchlight procession from the dining-hall in the heart of Leeds to Kitson's residence at Headingley. On the Saturday, after some minor engagements, the character of which I forget, but which involved a certain amount of speech-making, Mr. Gladstone was entertained at luncheon in the Victoria Hall by the Leeds Liberal Club, of which I was the honorary secretary; and after speaking there he went direct to the temporary building erected in the Cloth-hall yard, and there addressed a mass meeting of many thousands of persons. Afterwards he attended a large dinner party at the house of Mr. Barran, and at ten o'clock departed from Leeds by special train for Hawarden. It will be seen that the burden of work laid upon him was enormous, especially considering the fact that he was already in his seventy-second year. Yet his wonderful constitution and untiring energy enabled him to go through the whole programme not only with apparent ease, but with an exuberant vitality that seemed to suggest that if his engagements had been twice as numerous he would have been equal to them all. I doubt if any other statesman ever before got through so much work and speech-making in the course of a couple of days.