have ever been patient with me.

Yet this period of lecturing has been, after all, a side issue. The
Temple, and its church, in Philadelphia, which, when its membership was
less than three thousand members, for so many years contributed through
its membership over sixty thousand dollars a year for the uplift of
humanity, has made life a continual surprise; while the Samaritan
Hospital's amazing growth, and the Garretson Hospital's dispensaries,
have been so continually ministering to the sick and poor, and have done
such skilful work for the tens of thousands who ask for their help each
year, that I have been made happy while away lecturing by the feeling
that each hour and minute they were faithfully doing good. Temple
University, which was founded only twenty-seven years ago, has already
sent out into a higher income and nobler life nearly a hundred thousand
young men and women who could not probably have obtained an education
in any other institution. The faithful, self-sacrificing faculty, now
numbering two hundred and fifty-three professors, have done the
real work. For that I can claim but little credit; and I mention
the University here only to show that my "fifty years on the lecture
platform" has necessarily been a side line of work.

My best-known lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," was a mere accidental
address, at first given before a reunion of my old comrades of the
Forty-sixth Massachusetts Regiment, which served in the Civil War and in
which I was captain. I had no thought of giving the address again, and
even after it began to be called for by lecture committees I did not
dream that I should live to deliver it, as I now have done, almost five
thousand times. "What is the secret of its popularity?" I could never
explain to myself or others. I simply know that I always attempt to
enthuse myself on each occasion with the idea that it is a special
opportunity to do good, and I interest myself in each community and
apply the general principles with local illustrations.

The hand which now holds this pen must in the natural course of events
soon cease to gesture on the platform, and it is a sincere, prayerful
hope that this book will go on into the years doing increasing good for
the aid of my brothers and sisters in the human family.

RUSSELL H. CONWELL.

South Worthington, Mass.,

September 1, 1913.

[Footnote 1: This is the most recent and complete form of the lecture.
It happened to be delivered