particular?" He was
somebody in particular, all over and all of the time.

That story about how the stevedores on the docks in Liverpool turned and
looked at Daniel Webster and said, "There goes the King of America," has
been related of James Oliver. He was a commanding figure, with the face
and front of a man in whom there was no parley. He was a good man to
agree with. In any emergency, even up to his eightieth year, he would
have at once taken charge of affairs by divine right. His voice was the
voice of command.

So there at Chicago he was always the center of an admiring group. He
was Exhibit A of the Oliver Plow Works Exhibition and yet he never
realized it. One day, when he was in a particularly happy mood, and the
Scotch bur was delightfully apparent, as it was when he was either very
angry or very happy, an elderly woman pushed her way through the throng
and seizing the hand that ruled the Oliver Plow Works in both of her
own, said in ecstatic tones: "Oh! it is such a joy to see you again.
Twenty years ago I used to hear you preach every Sunday!"

For once James Oliver was undone. He hesitated, stammered and then
exclaimed in flat contradiction, "Madam, you never heard me preach!"

"Why, aren't you Robert Collyer--the Reverend Robert Collyer?"

"Not I, madam. My name is Oliver, and I make plows," was the proud
reply.

That night Oliver asked his trusted helper, Captain Nicar, this
question: "I say, Nicar, who is this man Collyer--that woman was the
third person within a week who mistook me for that preacher. I don't
look like a dominie, do I, Captain?"

And then Captain Nicar explained what Mr. Oliver had known, but which
had temporarily slipped his mind--that Robert Collyer was a very great
preacher, a Unitarian who had graduated out of orthodoxy, and who in his
youth had been a blacksmith.

"Why didn't he stay a blacksmith, if he was a good one, and let it go at
that?"

But this Nicar couldn't answer. However, the very next day Robert
Collyer came along, piloted by Marshall Field, and Oliver had an
opportunity to put the question to the man himself.

Robert Collyer was much impressed by Mr. Oliver, and Mr. Oliver declared
that Mr. Collyer was not to blame for his looks. And so they shook
hands.

Collyer was at Chicago to attend the Parliament of Religions. This
department of the great Exposition had not before especially appealed to
Oliver--machinery was his bent. But now he forgot plows long en