Near my home in the Berkshires, Charles Dudley Warner was born. When he had accomplished great things in literature and had written "My Summer in a Garden," that popular work which attracted the attention of his newspaper friends, he went to Hartford, where the latter gave him a banquet. I was invited to attend and report it for the public press. They lauded him and said how beautiful it was to be so elevated above his fellow men, and how great he was in the estimation of the world But he in his answer to the toast said, "Gentlemen, I wish for no fame, I desire no glory and you have made a mistake if you think I enjoy any such notoriety. I envy the Hartford teacher whose smile threw sunshine along her pathway." Then he told us the story of a poor little boy, cold and barefooted, standing on the street on a terribly cold day. A lady came along, and looking kindly at him, said, "Little boy, are you cold?" The little fellow, looking up into her face, said, "Yes Ma'am, I was cold till you smiled." He would rather have a smile like that and the simple love of his fellow men than to have all the fame of the earth. He was honored in all parts of the world by the greatest of the great, yet he was a sad man when he wrote "My Summer in a Garden," and it all seems a mystery how he could in such grief have written that remarkable little tale. This sadness is often associated with humorists. Mr. Shaw was one of the saddest men I ever met. Why, he cried on the slightest occasion. I went one day to interview him in Boston, and Mr. Shepard, his publisher, said "Please don't trouble Josh Billings now." "What is the matter?" "Oh, he is crying again," said Mr. Shepard. I asked him how Mr. Shaw could write such funny things as he did. He then showed me the manuscript (which Mr. Shaw had just placed on his desk and which he had just written), in which he says, "I do not know any cure for laziness, but I have known a second wife to hurry it up some." Artemus Ward wrote the most laughable things while his heart was in the deepest wretchedness. Often these glimpses of the funny men whose profession would seem to show them to be the happiest of earth's people, prove that they are sometimes the most gloomy and miserable.