ts toward
the "horse hire." It was a curious fact that one member of that club
afterward moved to Salt Lake City and was a member of the committee at
the Mormon Tabernacle in 1872 which, when I was a correspondent, on
a journey around the world, employed me to lecture on "Men of the
Mountains" in the Mormon Tabernacle, at a fee of five hundred dollars.

While I was gaining practice in the first years of platform work, I had
the good fortune to have profitable employment as a soldier, or as a
correspondent or lawyer, or as an editor or as a preacher, which enabled
me to pay my own expenses, and it has been seldom in the fifty years
that I have ever taken a fee for my personal use. In the last thirty-six
years I have dedicated solemnly all the lecture income to benevolent
enterprises. If I am antiquated enough for an autobiography, perhaps I
may be aged enough to avoid the criticism of being an egotist, when I
state that some years I delivered one lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," over
two hundred times each year, at an average income of about one hundred
and fifty dollars for each lecture.

It was a remarkable good fortune which came to me as a lecturer when Mr.
James Redpath organized the first lecture bureau ever established. Mr.
Redpath was the biographer of John Brown of Harper's Ferry renown, and
as Mr. Brown had been long a friend of my father's I found employment,
while a student on vacation, in selling that life of John Brown. That
acquaintance with Mr. Redpath was maintained until Mr. Redpath's death.
To General Charles H. Taylor, with whom I was employed for a time as
reporter for the Boston _Daily Traveler_, I was indebted for many acts
of self-sacrificing friendship which soften my soul as I recall them. He
did me the greatest kindness when he suggested my name to Mr. Redpath
as one who could "fill in the vacancies in the smaller towns" where the
"great lights could not always be secured."

What a glorious galaxy of great names that original list of Redpath
lecturers contained! Henry Ward Beecher, John B. Gough, Senator Charles
Sumner, Theodore Tilton, Wendell Phillips, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore,
Bayard Taylor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, with many of the great preachers,
musicians, and writers of that remarkable era. Even Dr. Holmes, John
Whittier, Henry W. Longfellow, John Lothrop Motley, George William
Curtis, and General Burnside were persuaded to appear one or more times,
although they refused to receive pay. I cann