The upshot of the whole matter was that I told Mr. Hughson that I would be glad to come and recite the following Wednesday (a week later), and a week later we hired Bert’s wagon, and with James holding the reins, Minerva by his side (of course we could not leave her at home alone) and Ethel and I on the back seat, we drove down to the Sunday School of the church. I wish that the good pastor had introduced me. He was a man who had moved among his fellows and who knew life and had a sense of values, while the man who did introduce me, and who shall be nameless, was insincere, shallow, a flatterer and fond of the sound of his own voice. I can say these things thus plainly, because he is now spending a year or so in State prison for breaking the sixth commandment. (No need to look it up; it is “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”) To tell the truth, I did not want to be introduced. I had not recited for months, and I was feeling frightfully nervous. So much so that my knees wabbled, my palms were moist and my throat parched. I would gladly have given the Y. M. S. C. ten dollars to release me, only I didn’t have my check-book with me. This full-whiskered man, who was the Sunday School superintendent, took his long length up onto the platform and bowing and grimacing said, in a hard, flat voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, I think that we of Egerton have always been fortunate in securing the summer services of various people who are eminent in the walks of life to which it has pleased God to call them. You may remember that last summer we had the eminent English scientist, Professor Drysden, who did some very clever card tricks for us; the year before we had Rev. Amaziah Barton, who sang a very amusing coon song for us, and I think it was the year before that that the famous Arctic explorer, whose name escapes me, entertained us with ventriloquial tricks. All these men showed in thus—er—doing things that were in a measure outside of the ordinary line of their duties, how manifold are the workings of the human brain. “To-night we have with us a man whose name is known wherever the English language is spoken; a man whose erudite works are upon every shelf, a man who has reflected lustre upon the language spoken by Chaucer and Spenser—” (I have never written anything under the name of Philip Vernon, so that my hearers were so far entirely in the dark as to my identity.) “Mr. Vernon is a frequent contributor to the _Antarctic Magazine_, and those of us who feel that the month has not been well spent until we have absorbed its contents know Mr. Vernon’s work as we know our Bibles.