At Kansas City I met Mr. C. B. Ellis, dealer in bicycles, and one or two other wheelmen. In meeting, as I have on the trip, many Connecticut people who have settled in the West, it is pleasant to have them all or nearly all express the desire to return East to live, sometime, when they have made money enough. Some place that wished-for event ten years hence, others longer, but all show that the "good old State of Connecticut" occupies a prominent place in their future plans and prospects. It is their ideal of a place to live in. It is mine. Miles traveled on the wheel, 3,627. CHAPTER XXIV. THE TRIENNIAL CONCLAVE AT ST. LOUIS. Reaching San Francisco in season to witness the encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, I was quite as fortunate in getting to St. Louis on the eve of the triennial conclave of the Knights Templars. Intending at first to make a stay in the city of but a few days, various causes induced me to lengthen the visit to nearly or quite two weeks, and the chief reason for this was the kind invitation of A. W. Sumner, now proprietor of the St. Louis Stoneware Company, but once an old schoolmate of mine, to remain with him while waiting for my bicycle to be repaired. He and I had not met since we both attended Rev. Mr. Hall's School at Ellington, Conn., nearly twenty years since, and after "Hello, Poggy," and "Hello, Bubby," had come to our lips spontaneously, we talked over and looked back to the time we spent in Ellington with very much the same feelings, I think, that Nicholas Nickleby had when he recalled his experiences under Squeer's at Dotheboy's Hall. Still we bear no ill will against the apple-trees in the rear of the school-house, but think it doubtful if those trees themselves have borne anything since, after furnishing so many switches to be used for our moral welfare and physical uplifting. But these reflections were soon forgotten in the noise and excitement of the week. The Charity Concert at the fair grounds, the proceeds of which were for the benefit of the widows and orphans of Masons, was a great success money-wise, but hardly from any other point of view. The immense band-stand was built on the inside of the mile track so far out into the field that the music could scarcely be heard on the grand-stand, which, by the way, is probably the largest and finest one in the country, and after the first number had been played the majority of the eight or ten thousand people who had paid a dollar for a seat, in addition to the fifty cents admission fee, on the grand-stand, left it in disgust and gathered out in the field where something of the music could be heard, besides the cannon accompaniment, if that part can be called music at all. Seats were provided for twice the number of musicians that could finally be persuaded to participate, for many union musicians refused to play in a concert with non-union musicians, and so there were many vacant chairs among the performers.