EXPERIENCES OF A PUBLIC LECTURER.
DURING the past fifteen years, I have, in addition to some work of authorship, travelled extensively as a public lecturer. There has been no season, and have been few months, of any year, in which I have not filled some platform engagements. This task has been a laborious and exacting one; it has withheld from me some of the time and energy that perhaps might as well have been put into literary effort; but it is not without satisfactions and fascinations, and carries with it the charm of fair and immediate financial rewards.
My lecturing efforts began at home, upon my father's farm. Having succeeded in hearing two or three good speakers who had visited our little neighboring village, I decided straightway that forensic effort was to be part of my life-business. So the sheep and cattle were obliged to hear various emotional opinions on subjects of more or less importance, and our steeds of the plough enjoyed a great many comfortable rests between furrows in order to "assist" at my oratorical displays. One of them persisted in always going to sleep before the discourse was finished,—a custom that is not obsolete even among his human superiors.
The first lecture-course of this series came to an end quite suddenly; for my shrewd, hard-headed New-England father began to suspect that agriculture was being sacrificed to eloquence. So he appeared unexpectedly in the audience during a matinée, and told me he had heard most of the harangue, and that he feared I was spoiling a tolerably good farmer to become an intolerably bad orator. Though of a kindly, generous disposition, he could throw into his less gracious words a great deal of sarcasm to the square inch, and the lecturer of the afternoon, crushed but not convinced, wakened the off-horse and thoughtfully drove his plough towards the blue woods at the other end of the furrow.
It is a pleasant memory that my father lived to see me earning a hundred dollars a night, and admitted, with a grave twinkle in his eye, that, having looked the matter over from a non-agricultural stand-point, he had concluded there was more in me than he had supposed.
But in those boy-days both lecturing and literature developed very slowly. How was I to get audiences, either for pen or voice? The harvest was ripe, but there were great reapers thundering up and down the field and warning me, with my poor little sickle, to keep out of the way. Gough could charm a hundred thousand people per year; Anna Dickinson stood in the heyday of her forensic glory; Theodore Tilton
