tedly draw increased audiences, and
certainly no man--not even Gough--ever so stirred all classes of our people
on the subject of temperance as has Benson. The receipts at the door last
evening were about one hundred and forty dollars. A number who had
purchased tickets previous to the lecture were unable to get in the hall."

And this from the Pittsburg (Pa.) Gazette:

"Luther Benson, Esq., of Indiana, has just closed one of the most powerful
temperance lectures ever delivered here. The house was one solid mass of
people, with not one spare inch of standing-room. For nearly two hours he
held the audience as by magic. At the close a large number signed the
pledge, some of them the hardest drinkers here. The people are so delighted
with his good work that they have secured him for another lecture Wednesday
evening."

The next extract is from the Manchester (N.H.) Press:

"Smyth's Hall was completely filled, seats and standing room, at two
o'clock Sunday afternoon, with an audience which came to hear Luther
Benson. The officers of the Reform Club, clergymen and reformed drunkards
occupied seats upon the platform. Mr. Benson is a native of Indiana, and
says he has been a drunkard from six years of age. He was within three
months of graduation from college when he was expelled for drunkenness.
Then he studied for a lawyer, and was admitted to practice, being drunk
while studying, and drunk while engaged in a case. At length he reduced
himself to poverty, pawning all he had for drink. At length he started to
reform, and though he had once fallen, he was determined to persevere.
Since his reformation two years ago he had been giving temperance lectures.
He is a young man, a powerful, swinging sort of speaker, with a good
command of language, original, with peculiar intonation, pronunciation and
idioms, sometimes rough, but eminently popular with his audiences. He spoke
for an hour and a half steadily, wiping the perspiration from his face at
intervals, taking up the greater part of his address with his personal
experience. He said he had had delirium tremens several times, once for
fifteen days, and gave an exceedingly minute and graphic description of his
torments. A number of men signed the pledge at the close of the meeting,
Among them was one man, who sat in front of the audience and kept drinking
from a bottle he had, evidently in a spirit of bravado, but at the
conclusion of the address he signed the pledge, crying li