Union a certain number of lectures were open to me
and so night by night, in company with my fellow "nuts," I called for my
ticket and took my place in line at the door, like a charity patient at
a hospital. However, as I seldom occupied a seat to the exclusion of
anyone else and as my presence usually helped to keep the speaker in
countenance, I had no qualms.

The Union audience was notoriously the worst audience in Boston, being
in truth a group of intellectual mendicants waiting for oratorical
hand-me-outs. If we didn't happen to like the sandwiches or the dry
doughnuts given us, we threw them down and walked away.

Nevertheless in this hall I heard nearly all the great preachers of the
city, and though some of their cant phrases worried me, I was benefited
by the literary allusions of others. Carpenter retained nothing of the
old-fashioned theology, and Hale was always a delight--so was Minot
Savage. Dr. Bartol, a quaint absorbing survival of the Concord School of
Philosophy, came once, and I often went to his Sunday service. It was
always joy to enter the old West Meeting House for it remained almost
precisely as it was in Revolutionary days. Its pews, its curtains, its
footstools, its pulpit, were all deliciously suggestive of the time when
stately elms looked in at the window, and when the minister, tall,
white-haired, black-cravatted arose in the high pulpit and began to read
with curious, sing-song cadences a chant from _Job_ I easily imagined
myself listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

His sermons held no cheap phrases and his sentences delighted me by
their neat literary grace. Once in an address on Grant he said, "He was
an atmospheric man. He developed from the war-cloud like a bolt of
lightning."

Perhaps Minot Savage pleased me best of all for he too was a disciple of
Spencer, a logical, consistent, and fearless evolutionist. He often
quoted from the poets in his sermon. Once he read Whitman's "Song of
Myself" with such power, such sense of rhythm that his congregation
broke into applause at the end. I heard also (at Tremont temple and
elsewhere) men like George William Curtis, Henry Ward Beecher, and
Frederick Douglass, but greatest of all in a certain sense was the
influence of Edwin Booth who taught me the greatness of Shakespeare and
the glory of English speech.

Poor as I was, I visited the old Museum night after night, paying
thirty-five cents which admitted me to a standing place in the first