To be obliged to await your turn, in a very cold hall, while another speaker gives an address with stereoscopic illustrations, is not enlivening to the spirits. In spite of the assurance that the first talk will be very brief, you have a dreadful foreknowledge that it will not be. You grow more and more depressed as he goes on and on, for you know full well that your audience will be already wearying before you begin. Those who have no sense of the passage of time should not be expected to divide the program with others. Thomas Nelson Page, when reading his own stories, is as genial and delightful as they are. We went to hear him speak on the literature of the South with the pleasantest anticipations. Richard Watson Gilder and Sister Maud were also to make addresses—or so we hoped. But as Mr. Page went on and on, these hopes faded away. In his amiable desire to do justice to all the writers of his section of the country, he forgot the limitations of time and space. A gentleman in my vicinity became actually savage in his impatience and was with difficulty restrained from violence by his wife. Mr. Page must have spoken for two hours—or so it seemed,—the other speakers’ time being reduced to a few minutes. When we met him next day and complimented him on his address, he naïvely replied, “I could have done better if I could have had more time!” Mr. Page is by no means the only person whom I have heard offend in this way. Hence the warning-bell of women’s conventions is an excellent institution. The local talent must sometimes be reckoned with. I am very fond of music, but, in my opinion, it is a mistake to present a mixed program, consisting half of concert and half of lecture, to a club audience. Such an occasion is of a mongrel order. A single song may pleasantly preface the literary exercises, but this it is difficult to have. In the midst of a series of earnest talks on schools as social centers, or on votes for women, to have your train of thought suddenly interrupted by operatic quavers from the local soprano, with accompanying flower presentation, is disturbing. Marion Crawford was a delightful speaker. It once happened, when we were in Boston, that several of us were to speak on the same day. “Five of the family are going to make the platform creak to-night!” exclaimed Crawford. At a lecture course which I arranged in Plainfield he was the great attraction. The talk was given in a hall of pleasant size, not too large to permit a certain intimacy between speaker and audience. Crawford was at his best. Feeling, as a lecturer so quickly does, the interest and sympathy of his hearers, he was as genial and delightful as if he had been talking to half a dozen of us in a parlor. Among those that surrounded him after the address was an enthusiastic lady who declared him to be the equal of Thackeray. The dear fellow deprecated this praise, yet he clearly liked it, as who would not?