as a great man, because, since his departure
from office, there had been no rumor of his having applied to Major Pond
to get up a lecturing tour for him in the United States.

It was not news to me that there are plenty of people in America who
laugh at the European author's trick of going to the American platform
as soon as he has made a little name for himself in his own country. The
laugh finds an echo in England, especially from some journalists who
have never been asked to go, and from a few men who, having done one
tour, think it wise not to repeat the experience. For my part, when I
consider that Emerson, Holmes, Mark Twain, have been lecturers, that
Dickens, Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Sala, Stanley, Archdeacon Farrar,
and many more, all have made their bow to American audiences, I fail to
discover anything very derogatory in the proceeding.

[Illustration: A PIG SQUEALING.]

Besides, I feel bound to say that there is nothing in a lecturing tour
in America, even in a highly successful one, that can excite the envy of
the most jealous "failure" in the world. Such work is about the hardest
that a man, used to the comforts of this life, can undertake. Actors, at
all events, stop a week, sometimes a fortnight, in the cities they
visit; but a lecturer is on the road every day, happy when he has not to
start at night.

No words can picture the monotony of journeys through an immense
continent, the sameness of which strikes you as almost unbearable.
Everything is made on one pattern. All the towns are alike. To be in a
railroad car for ten or twelve hours day after day can hardly be called
luxury, or even comfort. To have one's poor brain matter thus shaken in
the cranium is terrible, especially when the cranium is not quite full.
Constant traveling softens the brain, liquefies it, churns it,
evaporates it, and it runs out of you through all the cracks of your
head. I own that traveling is comfortable in America, even luxurious;
but the best fare becomes monotonous and unpalatable when the dose is
repeated every day.

To-morrow night I lecture in Minneapolis. The next night I am in
Detroit. Distance about seven hundred miles.

"Can I manage it?" said I to my impresario, when he showed me my route.

"Why, certn'ly," he replied; "if you catch a train after your lecture, I
guess you will arrive in time for your lecture in Detroit the next day."

These remarks, in America, are made without a smile.

On arriving at