"The uproar would come in on this side, and then on that. They would put insulting questions and make all sorts of calls to me, and I would wait until the noise had subsided and then get in about five minutes of talk. The reporters would get that down, and then up would come another noise. Occasionally I would see things that amused me, and I would laugh outright, and the crowd would stop to see what I was laughing at. Then I would sail in with another sentence or two. A good many times the crowd threw up questions that I caught and threw back. I may as well at this point mention a thing that amused me hugely. There were baize doors that opened both ways into side alleys, and there was a huge burly Englishman standing right in front of one of these doors and roaring like a bull of Bashan. One of the policemen swung his elbow round and hit him in the belly and knocked him through the doorway, so that the last part of his bawl was out in the alleyway. It struck me so ludicrously to think how the fellow must have looked when he found himself 'hollering' outside, that I could not refrain from laughing outright. The audience immediately stopped its uproar, wondering what I was laughing at. That gave me another chance, and I caught on to it. So we kept it up for about an hour and a half before the people became so far calmed down that I could go on peaceably with my speech. My audience got to like the pluck I showed. Englishmen like a man that can stand on his feet and give and take, and so for the last hour I had pretty much clear sailing. The next morning every great paper in England had the whole speech down. "And when the vote came to be taken--for in England it is customary for audiences to express their decision on the subject under discussion--you would have thought it was a tropical thunder-storm that swept through the hall as the Ayes were thundered, while the Nays were an insignificant and contemptible minority. It had all gone on our side, and such enthusiasm I never saw." It has been repeatedly stated, and to this day is generally believed,--is so stated in several of Mr. Lincoln's biographies, I believe,--that Mr. Beecher went to England at the President's request, and for the purpose of making a speaking tour. The best answer is that given by Mr. Beecher himself. "It has been asked," said he, "whether I was sent by the government. The government took no stock in me at that time. I had been pounding Lincoln in the earlier years of the war, and I don't believe there was a man down there, unless it was Mr. Chase, who would have trusted me with anything. At any rate, I went on my own responsibility." But in referring to Abolition orators, and especially orators whose experience it was to encounter mobs, the writer desires to pay a tribute to one of them whose name he does not even know.