l have no trouble." And it had worked. At the
halting lameness of the beginning an egg was thrown,--fortunately wide of
the mark. After this incident Stephen fairly astonished his audience,
--especially an elderly gentleman who sat on a cracker-box in the rear, out
of sight of the stand. This may have been Judge Whipple, although we have
no proof of the fact.

Stephen himself would not have claimed originality for that speech. He
laughs now when it is spoken of, and calls it a boyish effort, which it
was. I have no doubt that many of the master's phrases slipped in, as
young Mr. Brice could repeat most of the Debates, and the Cooper Union
speech by heart. He had caught more than the phrasing, however. So imbued
was he with the spirit of Abraham Lincoln that his hearers caught it; and
that was the end of the rotten eggs and the cabbages. The event is to be
especially noted because they crowded around him afterward to ask
questions. For one thing, he had not mentioned abolition. Wasn't it true,
then, that this Lincoln wished to tear the negro from his master, give
him a vote and a subsidy, and set him up as the equal of the man that
owned him? "Slavery may stay where it is," cried the young orator. "If it
is content there, so are we content. What we say is that it shall not go
one step farther. No, not one inch into a northern territory."

On the next occasion Mr. Brice was one of the orators at a much larger
meeting in a garden in South St. Louis. The audience was mostly German.
And this was even a happier event, inasmuch as Mr. Brice was able to
trace with some skill the history of the Fatherland from the Napoleonic
wars to its Revolution. Incidentally he told them why they had emigrated
to this great and free country. And when in an inspired moment he coupled
the names of Abraham Lincoln and Father Jahn, the very leaves of the
trees above them trembled at their cheers.

And afterwards there was a long-remembered supper in the moonlit grove
with Richter and a party of his college friends from Jena. There was Herr
Tiefel with the little Dresden-blue eyes, red and round and jolly; and
Hauptmann, long and thin and sallow; and Korner, redbearded and
ponderous; and Konig, a little clean-cut man with a blond mustache that
pointed upward. They clattered their steins on the table and sang
wonderful Jena songs, while Stephen was lifted up and his soul carried
off to far-away Saxony,--to the clean little University town with its