born. When
he had accomplished great things in literature and had written "My
Summer in a Garden," that popular work which attracted the attention
of his newspaper friends, he went to Hartford, where the latter gave
him a banquet. I was invited to attend and report it for the public
press. They lauded him and said how beautiful it was to be so elevated
above his fellow men, and how great he was in the estimation of the
world But he in his answer to the toast said, "Gentlemen, I wish for
no fame, I desire no glory and you have made a mistake if you think
I enjoy any such notoriety. I envy the Hartford teacher whose smile
threw sunshine along her pathway." Then he told us the story of a poor
little boy, cold and barefooted, standing on the street on a terribly
cold day. A lady came along, and looking kindly at him, said, "Little
boy, are you cold?" The little fellow, looking up into her face, said,
"Yes Ma'am, I was cold till you smiled." He would rather have a smile
like that and the simple love of his fellow men than to have all the
fame of the earth. He was honored in all parts of the world by the
greatest of the great, yet he was a sad man when he wrote "My Summer
in a Garden," and it all seems a mystery how he could in such grief
have written that remarkable little tale. This sadness is often
associated with humorists. Mr. Shaw was one of the saddest men I
ever met. Why, he cried on the slightest occasion. I went one day to
interview him in Boston, and Mr. Shepard, his publisher, said "Please
don't trouble Josh Billings now." "What is the matter?" "Oh, he is
crying again," said Mr. Shepard. I asked him how Mr. Shaw could write
such funny things as he did. He then showed me the manuscript (which
Mr. Shaw had just placed on his desk and which he had just written),
in which he says, "I do not know any cure for laziness, but I have
known a second wife to hurry it up some." Artemus Ward wrote the most
laughable things while his heart was in the deepest wretchedness.
Often these glimpses of the funny men whose profession would seem to
show them to be the happiest of earth's people, prove that they are
sometimes the most gloomy and miserable.

John B. Gough, the great temperance orator, the greatest the world has
ever seen, said to me one evening at his home that he would lecture
for forty years, and then would stop. But his wife said, "Now, John,
you know you won't give it up." He assented, "Yes, I will." But his
wife sa