As I look back now, after the lapse of many years, upon that memorable time--for the Leeds visit was memorable, not only in Mr. Gladstone's career, but in the political history of the country--the two speeches which stand out in greatest prominence are those which he delivered at the banquet on the Friday evening, and the mass meeting on the Saturday afternoon. The banquet narrowly escaped being a terrible fiasco. For the first time in my association with them, I had a difference of opinion with Kitson and Mathers regarding the arrangements for the dinner. The cost of erecting the special dining-hall was, of course, very considerable. I proposed that it should be met by a uniform charge of two guineas for the dinner tickets. My friends, on the other hand, prepared an elaborate plan by which the tickets were to be charged at different rates from one guinea up to five, according to the position of the seats. In this way more money was to be obtained, but it was at the cost of extra labour on the part of the executive, and of a good deal of grumbling from those local Liberals who had helped us most earnestly in the 1880 election, but who could not afford to pay the very high price demanded for the best seats. The allotment of these variously priced seats at the banquet was a heavy task, and it was undertaken by Mathers. Somehow or other he was delayed in his work until two days before the dinner was to take place, and then he was seized with sudden illness. I was called in to take his place, and discovered an alarming state of affairs. It was Wednesday night, Mr. Gladstone was to arrive on Thursday, and his heavy round of engagements was to begin on Friday morning. More than thirty thousand tickets had to be sent out to all parts of the country for the various meetings, and on Wednesday night not one ticket had been despatched. Moreover, Mathers had prepared so elaborate a scheme for the allotment and registration of all the tickets applied for, that a rapid calculation satisfied me that we could not possibly despatch the last of the tickets until at least two days after Mr. Gladstone's departure from Leeds. This was rather a terrible discovery to be made on the eve of the Premier's arrival. The knot had to be cut instead of being unravelled. I put aside the elaborate and irreproachable volumes in which Mathers and his staff had been entering the tickets at the time when he was seized with illness, and, with the help of a sixpenny memorandum book and half a dozen smart bank clerks, succeeded in allotting and posting the whole of the thirty thousand tickets between ten o'clock on Wednesday night and eight o'clock on Thursday morning. I never worked harder in my life, but when my work was done, and the tickets had all passed beyond my control, I fell into a terrible state of panic. I was firmly convinced that in my rapid allotment of seats to the five different orders of banqueters I had made the most hideous blunders, and I expected nothing