Riley’s talent as a reader (he disliked the term recitationist) was hardly second to his creative genius. As an actor--in such parts, for example, as those made familiar by Jefferson--he could not have failed to win high rank. His art, apparently the simplest, was the result of the most careful study and experiment; facial play, gesture, shadings of the voice, all contributed to the completeness of his portrayals. So vivid were his impersonations and so readily did he communicate the sense of atmosphere, that one seemed to be witnessing a series of dramas with a well-set stage and a diversity of players. He possessed in a large degree the magnetism that is the birthright of great actors; there was something very appealing and winning in his slight figure as he came upon the platform. His diffidence (partly assumed and partly sincere) at the welcoming applause, the first sound of his voice as he tested it with the few introductory sentences he never omitted--these spoken haltingly as he removed and disposed of his glasses--all tended to pique curiosity and win the house to the tranquillity his delicate art demanded. He said that it was possible to offend an audience by too great an appearance of cock-sureness; a speaker did well to manifest a certain timidity when he walked upon the stage, and he deprecated the manner of a certain lecturer and reader, who always began by chaffing his hearers. Riley’s programmes consisted of poems of sentiment and pathos, such as “Good-bye, Jim” and “Out to Old Aunt Mary’s,” varied with humorous stories in prose or verse which he told with inimitable skill and without a trace of buffoonery. Mark Twain wrote, in “How to Tell a Story,” that the wounded-soldier anecdote which Riley told for years was, as Riley gave it, the funniest thing he ever listened to. In his travels Riley usually appeared with another reader. Richard Malcolm Johnston, Eugene Field, and Robert J. Burdette were at various times associated with him, but he is probably more generally known for his joint appearances with the late Edgar W. (“Bill”) Nye. He had for Nye the warmest affection, and in the last ten years of his life would recount with the greatest zest incidents of their adventures on the road--Nye’s practical jokes, his droll comments upon the people they met, the discomforts of transportation, and the horrors of hotel cookery. Riley’s admiration for his old comrade was so great that I sometimes suspected that he attributed to Nye the authorship of some of his own stories in sheer excess of devotion to Nye’s memory.