forget this,
because it contains more in two lines than all I have said. Bailey
says: "He most lives who thinks most, who feels the noblest, and who
acts the best."

"PERSONAL GLIMPSES OF CELEBRATED MEN AND WOMEN."[A]

[Footnote A: Stenographic report by A. Russell Smith, Sec'y.]

When I had been lecturing forty years, which is now four years ago,
the Lecture Bureau suggested that before I retire from the public
platform, that I should prepare one subject and deliver it through the
country. For I had told the Bureau thirty years ago that when I had
lectured forty years, I would retire. They therefore suggested a talk
on this topic, "Personal Glimpses of Celebrated Men and Women." But a
death in our family which destroyed the homeness of our house produced
such an effect upon us that after the forty years came we found that
we would rather wander than stay at home, and consequently we are
traveling still, and will do so until the end. This explanation will
show why many of these things are said. For I must necessarily bring
myself often into this topic, sometimes unpleasantly to myself. Mark
Twain says, that the trouble with an old man is that he "remembers so
many things that ain't so," and with Mark Twain's caution in my ears,
I will try to give you these "Personal Glimpses of Celebrated Men and
Women."

I do not claim to be a very intimate friend of great men. But a fly
may look at an elephant, and for this reason we may glance at the
great men and women whom I have seen through the many years of public
life. Sometimes those glimpses give us a better idea of the real man
or woman than an entire biography written while he was living would
do; and to-night as a grandfather would bring his grandchildren to his
knee and tell them of his little experiences, so let me tell to you
these incidents in a life now so largely lived out.

As I glance back to the Hampshire Highlands of the dear old Berkshire
Hills in Massachusetts, where my father worked as a farmer among the
rooks for twenty years to pay off a mortgage of twelve hundred dollars
upon his little farm, my elder brother and myself slept in the attic
which had one window in the gable end, composed of four lights and
those very small. I remember that attic so distinctly now, with the
ears of corn hung by the husks on the bare rafters, the rats running
over the floor and sometimes over the faces of the boys; the patter of
the rain upon the roof, and the whist