erage at
that rate--must have numbered one hundred to two hundred sittings. Out
of all those there ought to be some good photographs. This is the best I
have had, and I am glad to have your honored names on it. I did not know
Harold Frederic personally, but I have heard a great deal about him, and
nothing that was not pleasant and nothing except such things as lead
a man to honor another man and to love him. I consider that it is a
misfortune of mine that I have never had the luck to meet him, and if
any book of mine read to him in his last hours made those hours easier
for him and more comfortable, I am very glad and proud of that. I call
to mind such a case many years ago of an English authoress, well known
in her day, who wrote such beautiful child tales, touching and lovely in
every possible way. In a little biographical sketch of her I found that
her last hours were spent partly in reading a book of mine, until she
was no longer able to read. That has always remained in my mind, and
I have always cherished it as one of the good things of my life. I had
read what she had written, and had loved her for what she had done.

Stanley apparently carried a book of mine feloniously away to Africa,
and I have not a doubt that it had a noble and uplifting influence
there in the wilds of Africa--because on his previous journeys he never
carried anything to read except Shakespeare and the Bible. I did not
know of that circumstance. I did not know that he had carried a book
of mine. I only noticed that when he came back he was a reformed man. I
knew Stanley very well in those old days. Stanley was the first man who
ever reported a lecture of mine, and that was in St. Louis. When I was
down there the next time to give the same lecture I was told to give
them something fresh, as they had read that in the papers. I met Stanley
here when he came back from that first expedition of his which closed
with the finding of Livingstone. You remember how he would break out at
the meetings of the British Association, and find fault with what people
said, because Stanley had notions of his own, and could not contain
them. They had to come out or break him up--and so he would go round and
address geographical societies. He was always on the warpath in
those days, and people always had to have Stanley contradicting their
geography for them and improving it. But he always came back and sat
drinking beer with me in the hotel up to two in the mornin