LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--I appear before you in accordance with the arrangement of a committee--a large committee--of intelligent and influential citizens of your own town. I am not before you for the purpose of making an effort as an orator, or a speaker, with any view or wish to fascinate or to charm my audience with the style or the language I employ in the brief address I am about to deliver. I am before you for the purpose of relating facts and localities, and giving you names in regard to the rebellion in the South, and the persecutions of my fellow countrymen, and their sufferings even unto death. I have met, since I came to this city, with not a few intelligent and high-toned gentlemen--men of years and of knowledge--who have inquired of me seriously: "Is it a fact that they hanged men, shot down men, in your country, for their sentiments?" You cannot, it seems to me, realize the state of things that has existed beyond the mountains. In what I shall say to you, without effort at all at display, I shall deal in nothing but facts. I will state nothing that I do not personally know to be true--nothing that I cannot sustain, if a controversy is raised in reference thereto. I have seen the day when I was a young man, ladies (I speak of my age with a great deal of freedom, for I have a wife who is likely never to die)--[laughter]--I have seen the day when I could be heard by an audience of any size--when I have been able for four or five dreadful hours on a stretch to speak in the open air. Those days with me have gone by, and are numbered with the days and years beyond the flood. For some three years back I have labored under a disease of the throat--a bronchial affection--a severe affliction it was. Until the last twelve months I could but whisper. In the providence of God, and through his agency, I am better now. In repeated denunciation of secession my voice has been gaining all the time [applause,] and I shall not be astonished if in six months "Richard is himself again." [Applause.] You will bear with me, I know, for I shall not detain you long. I shall by no means be tedious, but you will bear with me, I am certain, if I make a few remarks, by way of "preliminary," personal to myself. The circumstances surrounding me, the connection that my name has had for the last twelve months with the rebellion and with this subject, will justify me in so doing, without the dread of incurring the charge of egotism. I am a native of the Old Dominion--born, raised and educated in the State of Virginia. I have the pleasure of announcing to you this evening that you have before you the first man who ever made the acknowledgment in public, that he was the descendant of one of the second families of Virginia. [Laughter.]