In a spirit of jest he once promised a coachman a gift of five thousand dollars if the coachman succeeded in winning the hand and heart of a certain lady. He gave him one dollar on account never dreaming that the man would woo and win successfully. Imagine his surprise when six years later the man turned up and informed him of the date of the wedding. I happened to be present at the time at his summer place at Cohasset, Mass. The coachman went his way and Rob told me of his promise. I said, "Surely, you are not going to make good a promise made in jest?" He answered, "I am," went inside the house and in a few minutes came back on the veranda with the cheque for four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars in his hand. He called his daughter and sent her down the road with the cheque in quest of the young coachman, with instructions to present it to him as a wedding gift "from S. Robson, Esquire," ordered a brandy and soda from his servant and rudely left me with instructions to "Go home!" Knowing dear Rob's proclivities for B and S's, I loitered about for a few hours and then returned to the house, but Rob had disappeared. His daughter and I finally located him, with a few convivial friends in the hotel bar at Hingham. He called us to one side and quietly asked his daughter if she had performed the duty as requested. She answered, "Yes, papa, I gave him the cheque." Rob asked, "How did he take it?" His daughter replied, "Papa, he cried!" "How long did he cry?" asked Rob. "About a minute," she replied. "That's nothing," said Rob, "when I signed it I cried an hour!" I could fill pages with such deeds of his as this one and I knew him, man and boy, for thirty years. The world never knew a better man than Stuart Robson; a loving father, a dutiful husband, a great comedian, an honest actor and an upright American citizen. To quote from one of Boucicault's plays in which he appeared, "He had the soul of a Romeo and the face of a comic singer." God bless you, Rob, wherever you and our dear friend, Bob Ingersoll, are! Move over, and leave a place for me! If it's hell, I'll invoke a blizzard; if Heaven, we shall need each other's companionship! We shall say that we were wrong down here and ask to be forgiven. Shall we be? I wonder! _Chapter IV_ JOHN McCULLOUGH At the end of the year 1882 I attracted the attention of the manager of the Dramatic Festival which was to be held at Cincinnati and was engaged to play the grave digger in "Hamlet" and Modus in "The Hunchback." Neither of these parts had ever been assumed by me prior to his engagement. It had always been my desire to appear in Shakespearean rôles and other legitimate characters.