ose, gravely respectful, the janitor and
some loiterers took off their hats while I passed. I entered the little
bare dressing-room; my throat was parched as fever, my hands were hot
and tremulous; I felt my heart sag. How the rumble of expectant feet in
the audience-room shook me! I called myself a poltroon, and fingered my
neck-tie, and smoothed my hair before the mirror. Another burst of
impatient expectation made me start; I opened the door, and stood before
my destiny.

The place was about one third filled with a representative English
audience, the males preponderating in number. They watched me intently
as I mounted the steps of the rostrum and arranged my port-folio upon a
musical tripod; then I seated myself for a moment, and tried to still
the beating of my foolish heart.

How strangely acute were my perceptions of everything before me! I
looked from face to face and analyzed the expressions, counted the lines
down the corduroy pantaloons, measured the heavily-shod English feet,
numbered the rows of benches and the tubes of the chandeliers, and
figured up the losing receipts from this unremunerative audience.

Then I rose, coughed, held the house for the last time in severe review,
and repeated--

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN--A grand contest agitates America and the world.
The people of the two sections of the great North American Republic,
having progressed in harmony for almost a century, and become a
formidable power among the nations, are now divided and at enmity; they
have consecrated with blood their fairest fields, and built monuments of
bones in their most beautiful valleys," etc.

For perhaps five minutes everything went on smoothly. I was pleased with
the clearness of my voice; then, as I referred to the origin of the war,
and denounced the traitorous conspiracy to disrupt the republic, faint
mutterings arose, amounting to interruptions at last. The sympathies of
my audience were, in the main, with the secession. There were cheers and
counter cheers; storms of "Hear, hear," and "No, no," until a certain
youth, in a sort of legal monkey-jacket and with ponderously
professional gold seals, so distinguished himself by exclamations that I
singled him out as a mark for my bitterest periods.

But while I was thus the main actor in this curious scene, a strange,
startling consciousness grew apace upon me; the room was growing dark;
my voice replied to me like a far, hollow echo; I knew--I knew that I
was