still for the Redpath Bureau of
Boston. My experience with the Redpath people was especially gratifying.
Mrs. Livermore, who was their only woman lecturer, was growing old and
anxious to resign her work. She saw in me a possible successor, and
asked them to take me on their list. They promptly refused, explaining
that I must "make a reputation" before they could even consider me. A
year later they wrote me, making a very good offer, which I accepted. It
may be worth while to mention here that through my lecture-work at this
period I earned all the money I have ever saved. I lectured night after
night, week after week, month after month, in "Chautauquas" in the
summer, all over the country in the winter, earning a large income and
putting aside at that time the small surplus I still hold in preparation
for the "rainy day" every working-woman inwardly fears.

I gave the public at least a fair equivalent for what it gave me, for I
put into my lectures all my vitality, and I rarely missed an engagement,
though again and again I risked my life to keep one. My special
subjects, of course, were the two I had most at heart-suffrage and
temperance. For Frances Willard, then President of the Woman's Christian
Temperance Union, had persuaded me to head the Franchise Department of
that organization, succeeding Ziralda Wallace, the mother of Gen.
Lew Wallace; and Miss Susan B. Anthony, who was beginning to study me
closely, soon swung me into active work with her, of which, later, I
shall have much to say. But before taking up a subject as absorbing to
me as my friendship for and association with the most wonderful woman
I have ever known, it may be interesting to record a few of my pioneer
experiences in the lecture-field.

In those days--thirty years ago--the lecture bureaus were wholly
regardless of the comfort of their lecturers. They arranged a schedule
of engagements with exactly one idea in mind--to get the lecturer from
one lecture-point to the next, utterly regardless of whether she had
time between for rest or food or sleep. So it happened that
all-night journeys in freight-cars, engines, and cabooses were casual
commonplaces, while thirty and forty mile drives across the country in
blizzards and bitter cold were equally inevitable. Usually these things
did not trouble me. They were high adventures which I enjoyed at the
time and afterward loved to recall. But there was an occasional hiatus
in my optimism.

One night,