Pittsburg."

We were married in January, 1898.

The first reception given in our home on Massachusetts Avenue was in the
nature of a greeting between the Doctor's friends and myself. His own
interest in the social side of things in Washington was an agreeable
interruption rather than a part of his own activities. His friends were
men and women from every highway and byway of the world. My father, a
man of unusual intellectual breadth and heart, had been my companion of
many years, so that I was, to some degree, accustomed to mature
conceptions of people and affairs. But the busy whirl in the life of a
celebrity was entirely new.

It was soon quite evident that Dr. Talmage relied upon me for the
discretionary duties of a man besieged by all sorts of demands. From the
first I feared that Dr. Talmage was over-taxing his strength,
undiminished though it was at a time when most men begin to relinquish
their burdens. Therefore, I entered eagerly into my new duties of
relieving the strain he himself did not realise.

His was a full and ample life devoted to the gospel of cheerfulness; and
to me, I think, was given the best part of it--the autumn. When I knew
him he had already impressed the wide world of his hearers with his
striking originality of thought and style. He had already established a
form of preaching that was known by his name--Talmagic. Its character
was the man himself, broad, brilliant, picturesque, keen with divine and
human facts, told simply, always with an uplift of spiritual beauty.

In March, 1898, Dr. Talmage was called West for lecture engagements, and
I went with him. What strange and delightful events that spring tour
brought into my life! The Doctor lectured every night in what was to me
some new and undiscovered country. We were always going to an hotel, to
a train, to an opera house, to another hotel, another train, another
opera house. Our experiences were not less exciting than the trials of
one-night stands. I had never travelled before without a civilised quota
of trunks; but the Doctor would have been overwhelmed with them in the
rush to keep his engagements. So we had to be content with our bags.
When we were not studying time tables the Doctor was striding across the
land, his Bible under his arm, myself in gasping haste at his side. What
primitive hotels we encountered; what antiquated trains we had to take!
Frequently a milk train was the only means of reaching our destination,
and,