Apparently Blondin did not know what nervousness meant; his secret has been described as confidence in himself, obtained by long practice in rope-walking. There is no doubt some of the victims he has carried across his rope have suffered; it is said that Blondin would talk to his companions on the most indifferent subjects; he would urge them to sit perfectly still, avoid catching him around the neck or looking downward. What he considered as one of his greatest feats was in walking on a rope from the mainmast to the mizzen on board the Peninsular and Oriental steamer _Poonah_, while on her way to Australia, between Aden and Galle, in 1874. He had to sit down five times while heavy waves were approaching the ship. Blondin's last performance was in Agricultural Hall, London, on Christmas, 1894, where he appeared as active and nimble as ever. The fact is certainly wonderful that for nearly seventy years he walked the tight-rope without accident. Mr. W. D. Howells was an eye-witness to three crossings of Blondin's in 1860, which he has graphically described: The man himself looked cool and fresh enough but I, who was not used to such violent fatigues as he must have undergone in these three transits, was bathed in a cold perspiration, and so weak and worn with making them in sympathy that I could scarcely walk away. Long afterwards I was telling about this experience of mine--it was really more mine than Blondin's--in the neat shop of a Venetian pharmacist, to a select circle of the physicians who wait in such places in Venice for the call of their patients. One of these civilised men, asked: "Where was the government?" And I answered in my barbarous pride of our individualism: "The government had nothing to do with it. In America the government has nothing to do with such things." But now I think that this Venetian was right, and that such a show as I have tried to describe ought no more to have been permitted than the fight of a man with a wild beast. It was an offence to morality, and it thinned the frail barrier which the aspiration of centuries has slowly erected between humanity and savagery. Enough savage criticism met Blondin in England; his rope-walking in Crystal Palace, Sydenham, upon a rope 240 feet long and at a height of 170 feet, in imitation of the Niagara feat, was considered a sickening spectacle. Said _Once a Week_: We wish Mr. Blondin no sort of harm, but if his audiences were to dwindle down to nothing, so as to cause him to retire upon his savings, we should congratulate him upon having escaped a great danger, and the country upon getting rid of a disgrace to the intelligence of the age.