to be alive at
midnight, you will find the witching hours sad. Vainly you will seek
companionship, and will be reduced at last to reading the base-ball
reports in the newspapers of Cleveland, Ohio.

At the Athenaeum you are passed about, from meal to meal, like a one-card
draw at poker. The hotel is haunted by Old Chautauquans, who vie with each
other to receive you with traditional cordiality. The head-waitress steers
you for luncheon (I mean Dinner) to one table, for Supper to another, and
so on around the room from day to day. The process reminds you a little of
the procedure at a progressive euchre party. At each meal you meet a new
company of Old Chautauquans, and are expected to converse: but many
(indeed most) of these people are humanly refreshing, and the experience
is not so wearing as it sounds.

But you must not imagine from all that I have said that the life of the
lecturer at Chautauqua is merely frivolous. Not at all. You get up very
early, and proceed to Higgins Hall, a pleasant little edifice (named after
the late Governor of New York State) set agreeably amid trees upon a
rising knoll of verdure; and there you converse for a time about the
Drama, and for another time about the Novel. In each of these two courses
there were, perhaps, seventy or eighty students,--male and female, elderly
and young. I found them much more eager than the classes I had been
accustomed to in college, and at least as well prepared. They came from
anywhere, and from any previous condition of servitude to the general
cause of learning; but I found them apt, and interested, and alive.

Now and then it appeared that their sense of humor was a little less
fantastic than my own; but I liked them very much, because they were so
earnest and simple and human and (what is Whitman's adjective?) adhesive.

And now I come to the point that converted me finally to Chautauqua. I
found myself, after a few days, liking the people very much. In the
afternoons I talked in the Doric Temple about this man or that,--selected
from my company of well-beloved friends among "the famous nations of the
dead"; and the people came in hundreds and listened reverently--not, I am
very glad to know, because of any trick I have of setting words together,
but because of Stevenson and Whitman and the others, and what they meant
by living steadfast lives amid the hurly-burly of this roaring world, and
steering heroically by their stars. Some elderly matrons amo