The remark, following close as it did upon his laughing fit in the newspaper office, caused me to inquire why he had been called "a fool," and who had called him so. "It was the opinion of my friends on the paper," he replied. "I told them that I was going in for lecturing. They laughed at me, and called me `a fool.' Don't you think they were right?" Then we sauntered up Euclid Street, under the shade of its avenue of trees. As we went along, Artemus Ward recounted to me the story of his becoming a lecturer. Our conversation on that agreeable evening is fresh in my remembrance. Memory still listens to the voice of my companion in the stroll, still sees the green trees of Euclid Street casting their shadows across our path, and still joins in the laugh with Artemus, who, having just returned from California, where he had taken sixteen hundred dollars at one lecture, did not think that to be evidence of his having lost his senses. The substance of that which Artemus Ward then told me was, that while writing for the "Cleveland Plain Dealer" he was accustomed, in the discharge of his duties as a reporter, to attend the performances of the various minstrel troups and circuses which visited the neighbourhood. At one of these he would hear some story of his own, written a month or two previously, given by the "middle-man" of the minstrels and received with hilarity by the audience. At another place he would be entertained by listening to jokes of his own invention, coarsely retailed by the clown of the ring, and shouted at by the public as capital waggery on the part of the performer. His own good things from the lips of another "came back to him with alienated majesty," as Emerson expresses it. Then the thought would steal over him--Why should that man gain a living with my witticisms, and I not use them in the same way myself? why not be the utterer of my own coinage, the quoter of my own jests, the mouthpiece of my own merry conceits? Certainly, it was not a very exalted ambition to aim at the glories of a circus clown or the triumphs of a minstrel with a blackened face. But, in the United States a somewhat different view is taken of that which is fitting and seemly for a man to do, compared with the estimate we form in this country. In a land where the theory of caste is not admitted, the relative respectability of the various professions is not quite the same as it is with us. There the profession does not disqualify if the man himself be right, nor the claim to the title of gentleman depend upon the avocation followed. I know of one or two clowns in the ring who are educated physicians, and not thought to be any the less gentlemen because they propound conundrums and perpetrate jests instead of prescribing pills and potions.