As James Whitcomb Riley’s Hoosier dialect poems have charmed the American people, so have Dr. Drummond’s won the hearts of the Canadians. He reads as charmingly as he writes.

For the sake of those who are not familiar with his work, I quote (by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons) a few verses from his poem, “De Habitant.”

THOMAS NELSON PAGE has been the most successful of the Southern authors who have read from their own writings. He has done more to preserve the traditions of the old South, the old negro character, and the interior home life before the war, than any one else. I wish that I were able to write well enough to say what I would like to of this Southern gentleman of letters. He seems to convey all that is best in a character, whether master or slave, and in such a way that every one who reads his charming descriptive novels is made familiar with life in the South as it actually was before the war.

Shortly after “Marse Chan” made its appearance, I received letters from all parts of the country asking if Thomas Nelson Page, the author of that story, could be secured to give readings. It was some time before I obtained a favorable reply to my many invitations for him to let himself be seen as well as read. He was very shy and quite averse to making an exhibition of himself, claiming that he was not gifted with voice or histrionic ability. He did consent to give joint readings with F. Hopkinson Smith for a short tour, beginning in Boston, January 12, 1892, in cosy little Chickering Hall. I had hoped for a big success financially, but the fame of the two Southern authors had not preceded them at the Hub. They opened with a small audience; but the newspapers gave excellent reports the following day, which assured success for the balance of the season. A Boston success means a success in New England, but I had struck high for large cities. We went to Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington. The readings were attended by the choicest literary public in each city. Return engagements were made invariably, which were very remunerative, and there was a good deal of money in sight. Mr. Page was paving the way for a magnificent success another season, as was evident from the number of applications that came from every city where he had appeared.

Unfortunately, that season I made one engagement too many in Chicago, for from there I received notice from Mr. Page that he would not give another season to the platform under any conditions. Very shortly afterward I learned that in Chicago he had made the acquaintance of one of the most charming ladies in that city, who seemed to have more influence over him than the alluring promises of lyceum readings. To make a long story short, Mr. Page changed his manager.

He is now living in Washington, and I am happy to say that I can count him as one of my best friends.

Three years ago I was a guest at a dinner at his house given to Anthony Hope, where were present the Hon. Lyman Gage, Secretary of the Treasury, Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and James Lane Allen and Mr. John Fox, Jr., the two famous Southern novelists of the time. One can imagine the charming intellectual atmosphere of an occasion like this; none present but that felt there must have been some fault in the reckoning of time, for it was 4 A.M. when the party reluctantly dissolved.

Mr. Page has a beautiful home in Washington, and I know of no one better fitted for such charming surroundings. He is as delightful as a host and in his everyday conversation as he is as a reader of his fascinating Southern stories. One can spend a day with Mr. Page in ordinary travel and conversation and attend his readings at night, and find that he has been as delightfully entertained in the ordinary speech as by the public reading. He has the sweetest-speaking voice that I ever heard. There is no music more delightful to listen to.

For one reason I am glad that I was deprived of his services as a star. Had he continued on the platform he never would have written “Red Rock,” a book which has met with an enormous sale and which gives the most graphic picture of the trials that the Southerners endured during and after the war. It is probably because I had been a soldier four years and had known nearly every character exactly as Mr. Page has presented it to the present generation and preserved it for posterity that I enjoyed it so much. Thomas Nelson Page certainly has not lived in vain.

MR. JOHN FOX, JR., is a young friend of Mr. Page’s of whom I like to write. He is a Kentuckian, a Harvard man, lawyer, New York newspaper man, all-around athlete, and author of “The Cumberland Vendetta,” “Hell for Sartain,” and “The Kentuckians,” which have won him a position among the best writers of America and Europe.

In Thomas Nelson Page’s letter introducing Mr. Fox to me, he writes:

“Get John Fox some engagements. He is going to be a success, and some one else will secure him. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt was praising him to me the other night in a way to warm my heart.”

Mr. Fox is surely one of the most popular Southern authors of the time, and is very much appreciated in the South on account of his nativity as well as because of the high character of his literary work; but he has appeared before the most cultivated literary circles in all of the larger cities of the North, giving his dialect readings from his own sketches of life in the Cumberland Mountains. He discovered a dialect and lots of good in the humble people who inhabit that mountainous region, and who are the least known of any of the inhabitants of our country.

For the class he presents he is as thoroughly sympathetic as Thomas Nelson Page is for the old-time Virginia negro “uncles” and “aunties” he so charmingly describes. I do not know a more natural and, in a refined sense, unconventional man on the platform and before his audience than this handsome, well-bred, easy youngish gentleman from Bourbon County, Kentucky.

The Cumberland tableland, which is the scene of his stories, divides the Blue Ridge or Cumberland Mountains in East Tennessee from the “basin,” or central and western sections of that State, and runs, a rugged formation, into Southeast Kentucky. “Charles Egbert Craddock,” as Miss Murfree signs herself, has preceded John Fox in the same field, but the latter brought to his later task of dialect and character portraiture the physical sense of companionship from his ability to actualize in his own life the Cumberland mountaineer’s rugged out-of-door existence.

In my own wanderings as printer, soldier, and later lecture manager, I have often felt the variant charm of the many-sided life of our land. Often, too, have I wondered at men going abroad to find romance and striking character, when so much of it is to be readily seen at home. The Cumberland mountaineers, generally of non-slave-holding stock, hunters even more than farmers, strong Union men in days of need, as a rule, but intensely Southern, nevertheless, afford a field for the story-teller’s art which seems to me of the most interesting and unique character.

John Fox has won its secret and knows how to make others understand. He has a capital presence, a magnetic force and manner, and a most telling voice at his command. On the platform he is pretty much what he is off it, except that he is sensitively watchful of doing his work well. William Dean Howells declares that Fox brings a “fresh vision” and a “novel touch” in the seeing and presenting of his scenes and characters. If that is true of his books, it is more eminently so of his readings and lecture descriptions. He has no mannerisms and gives no evidence of effort. He simply tells and lives in the telling. What he gives is truly his own work. His dialect is perfect, but it is human and actual, not a mere caricature. The figures he gives are wholesome and clean, as is the man who presents them.

RUDYARD KIPLING and I have exchanged a number of letters, but up to the day before he was stricken with his late illness we had never met. After several attempts through his friends and publishers, members of the Century Co., to get an introduction to him, a common friend of the editorial staff said to me:

“Major, it’s no use; Kipling won’t see you.”

“What have I done?” I asked.

“Nothing,” replied my friend. “He says that he has been told that if he meets you he will go lecturing, and he doesn’t purpose to expose himself.”

And although his New York house was within a block of mine, he managed to keep out of my sight, much as I tried to meet him.

In 1895, while crossing the continent with Mark Twain on his lecture tour around the world, Mr. Kipling was often mentioned by Mark as the greatest “card” in the world, and I was urged to try to get him. “I am told he is the finest reader and interpreter of his own writings of all of us. Get him,” said Mark. So, on my return from Victoria, B. C., after having seen Mark and his wife and daughter sail out on the Warrimoo for Australia, I determined to call on Mr. Kipling at his home in Vermont, hoping that, on Mark’s suggestion, I might capture him. I received no reply to my various telegrams that I would call on such a day, but I had determined to make the effort. Yet when I started from Montreal to Brattleboro my courage failed. I did not stop, but wrote Mr. Kipling immediately on my arrival in New York, and received the following reply:

“Brattleboro, Vt., Sept. 30, 1895.

“Dear Mr. Pond:

“I am much obliged to you for your letter, but I can’t say that I can see my way to the ententement you propose. There is such a thing as paying one hundred and twenty-five cents for a dollar, and though I suppose there is money in the lecturing business, it seems to me that the bother, the fuss, the being at everybody’s beck and call, the night journeys, and so on, make it very dear. I’ve seen a few men who’ve lived through the fight, but they did not look happy. I might do it as soon as I had two mortgages on my house, a lien on the horses, and a bill of sale on the furniture, and writer’s cramp in both hands; but at present I’m busy and contented to go on with the regular writing business. You forget that I have already wandered over most of the States, and there isn’t enough money in sight to hire me to face again some of the hotels and some of the railway systems that I have met with. America is a great country, but she is not made for lecturing in. With renewed thanks for your very kind letter, believe me,

“Yours sincerely,
“Rudyard Kipling.”

Later I sent a complete set of his books, with a request that he favor me with his autograph in each volume (about twenty books). He unpacked, signed, and repacked them, and here is what he wrote:

“Dear Major Pond:

“Your order of the 22d instant has been filled, we trust to your satisfaction, and the stuff is returned herewith.

“We did not know that there would be such a mass of lumber to put through the mill; and we note also that your order covers at least two supplementary orders—(a) in the case of a young lady aged nineteen (not in original contract) and (b) an autograph work for which we have supplied one original hardwood case.

“Our mills are running full time at present, in spite of business depression; but we are very reluctant to turn away any job that offers under these circumstances, and making allowance for time consumed, sorting, packing, crating, and returning finished goods, we should esteem it a favor if you would see your way to forwarding an additional ten ($10) dollars to the Tribune Fresh Air Fund.

“Very sincerely yours,
“R. Kipling & Co.”

(Autographs supplied on moderate terms; guaranteed sentiments to order. Verse a specialty. No discount for cash.)

MY “BENEFIT” EXPERIENCE.

I had never believed in benefits for managers, for it is generally looked upon as a sort of give-away—an acknowledgment of an impecunious condition, like the beggar who stands on the street holding out his hat or turning a little hand-organ, labelled with the sign, “I am blind”—and one’s friends are liable to cut an old comrade in the street, or pass by on the other side, as an after-effect of such an appeal to the public.

It had been a hard season, and some of my friends had reaped pretty fair profits and urged me to accept a complimentary benefit, tendering their services and assistance gratuitously. My friend Bill Nye visited the proprietors of Chickering Hall and obtained from them the free use of that edifice for the entertainment, and my printers went so far as to volunteer to furnish programmes, tickets, and such advertising material as I wished. The newspapers, however, didn’t open their advertising columns gratuitously, as that would have been an innovation and an instance unparalleled in that department of newspaperdom, but the editors were very generous with their puffs.

So it was suggested by my friends George W. Cable, Max O’Rell, Bill Nye, and James Whitcomb Riley that I accept a testimonial. It was arranged that George W. Cable should be introduced by his friend Roswell Smith, president of the Century Co.; that Max O’Rell should be introduced by his friend, Gen. Horace Porter; Bill Nye by Col. John A. Cockerell, editor of the New York World, and one of the finest editor-orators of the time; and James Whitcomb Riley was to be introduced by Dr. Edward Eggleston, the Hoosier novelist, author of “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” and “The Hoosier Schoolboy.” Each one of these introducers was considered an attraction in himself.

The occasion was well advertised, circulars were sent out, and I think I never had a more copious response by mail than I had at that time from my friends, all asking for one or two tickets—complimentary, of course.

The time arrived, and my old friends turned out in full force—the old free list. The expenses were about $200, and the receipts about $110. I pocketed my loss of $90, and have discouraged every suggestion of a “benefit” offered since that time.

The entertainment was delightful. No audience ever went out of Chickering Hall with more beaming countenances, and I had congratulations from all my friends. I was asked by one friend, who had paid for her ticket, if I contemplated a tour to Europe. I certainly could afford it after receiving such a rousing benefit!

In an appropriate speech, Mr. Roswell Smith introduced his friend George W. Cable as the most successful magazine writer of his time, and dwelt upon the good fortune his writings had brought to the Century Co., of which he had the honor to be known as president.

His speech brought a hearty round of applause to Mr. Cable, as he stepped forward and read “Posson Jone’,” his favorite Creole story.

Then Col. John Cockerell, in his characteristic eloquence, presented his pet humorist, Bill Nye, who had come from the West on his invitation and accepted a position on the editorial staff of the New York World, and whose writings had quadrupled the circulation of the Sunday edition of that paper. He was eloquent in his eulogistic introduction, and Nye caught the inspiration as he wabbled down to the front of the stage. Without uttering a word he had the audience convulsed for a long time, and when he did begin his story of how he earned his first dollar, the audience fairly bubbled over, while there was not the slightest ripple on the speaker’s round countenance. Nye was bald-headed all over, and more so when in front of an audience.

Then Edward Eggleston, the Hoosier novelist, introduced James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet, with many happy turns on the term Hoosier and the Hoosier State. Roswell Smith was from Indiana, Nye was part Hoosier, and every one down on the programme was Indianian to some degree except possibly Max O’Rell, the French humorist.

Mr. Eggleston’s introduction of James Whitcomb Riley put the poet in trim for his best Hoosier interpretations, and before he had finished his recital everybody in that audience was Hoosier more or less.

General Porter was saved for the last. His witty introduction of the French humorist was the climax of the day. There had been so much Indiana and Hoosier in the programme, he said, that he felt a little embarrassed and discouraged, as the only novelty about his candidate for the audience’s amusement was that he was not from Indiana.

It was an interesting two hours’ display of ability and genius, wit and humor, such as would be difficult to reproduce at the present time.

GENERAL SURVEY OF THE LYCEUM FIELD

Previous to Mr. James Redpath’s establishment of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, the entertainment agency system of to-day had no existence; and to Mr. James Redpath, in connection with his energetic partner, Mr. George L. Fall, deceased, belongs the credit of instituting the bureau system, by means of which nearly all the lecture business of the country is now conducted. That I have had so much to do with this more latterly is due largely to my good fortune in knowing so well his methods, while winning and holding the personal friendship of the founder of “Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau.”

Mr. James Redpath was born in Berwick-on-Tweed, England, August 24, 1833, coming to this country in 1848 with his family. For two or three years he worked as a printer at Kalamazoo, Detroit, and Chicago, then went to New York, where he began to write for the daily and weekly press, and soon afterward became editorially connected with the New York Tribune.

His health failing, in 1854 he started on a tour on foot through the Southern seaboard States to see with his own eyes what slavery was. When winter set in he renewed his journey, partly on foot and partly by railroads and steamers, until he reached New Orleans. During all this long journey he talked with the slaves, slept in their cabins, ate of their humble fare, and listened to their distressing revelations. These conversations Mr. Redpath took down in shorthand, and sent a series of letters, descriptive of his walks and talks, to the New York Anti-Slavery Standard (William Lloyd Garrison’s paper)—letters which were afterward collected and published, and which elicited the highest praise of the leaders of the anti-slavery party.

From New Orleans Mr. Redpath went to St. Louis, where he at once obtained a position as reporter on the Missouri Democrat, a Republican daily paper. In 1855 the proprietors of that journal sent him to Kansas to report the proceedings of the “bogus legislature” convened at the Shawnee Mission. His reports of its proceedings and his descriptions of the scenes which took place were copied far and wide by the Republican press, and gave him at once a national reputation.

I was an awkward boy of eighteen, working at the “case” in beleaguered Lawrence, Kansas Territory, during the summer of 1856, and was drawn to the keen-witted, brave, friendly, and untiring young fellow who was constantly on the move as special correspondent of the New York Tribune and of the old Missouri Democrat of St. Louis. I had been reared on the old Try-bune up in the Wisconsin pioneer home where my boyhood was passed. That’s why I found myself out there in that Kansas summer of danger. When Redpath asked me to go to Prairie City with him—he was intending to interview John Brown, and it was dangerous—I was eager to go, because his articles in the Tribune had caused me to look upon him almost as a god, and where he went it was my ambition to follow.

In October, 1856, during the time of the blockade of the Missouri River by the border ruffians, Mr. Redpath led in an armed company of immigrants, whom he had brought overland from Illinois, and succeeded in locating them on the free soil of Kansas. He remained there for some months, taking an active part in Free State politics, and still acting as correspondent of the Missouri Democrat, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Tribune. Early in 1857 he left Kansas for Massachusetts, married, and resided at Malden, near Boston, until 1875, when he moved to New York.

In the fall of 1857 he went to Kansas to establish a weekly newspaper, and at Doniphan, December 15th, he issued the first number of The Crusader of Freedom. It was a radical anti-slavery journal; but owing to the failure of parties who had agreed to support him to fulfil their pledges, he was obliged to discontinue it, after three months’ publication, and returned to Boston.

At the time of John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, the press of all parties cried out against the act, and denounced old John Brown as a madman and a murderer. Mr. Redpath, who had long been on terms of intimacy with Brown, published a series of articles in his defence, and indorsed the step he had taken. These letters were followed by a “Life of John Brown,” which was written in three weeks. It was published in December, 1859, and had a sale of forty thousand copies. It was followed by the “Echoes of Harper’s Ferry,” which was a collection of the best speeches, sermons, articles, etc., relating to John Brown’s raid, and by “Southern Notes for National Circulation,” a large pamphlet exhibiting the character of the Southern people as seen by their acts following the execution of John Brown and some of his captured followers.

In 1863 Mr. Redpath began business as a publisher; but finding it uncongenial to his tastes, he soon abandoned it. His life from the fall of 1864 to 1866 was spent in the South, chiefly as army correspondent of Northern journals. He was at Atlanta with General Sherman, at the battle of Nashville with General Thomas, and with General Steadman and Colonel Rousseau in their movements to flank General Hood. Having accepted an offer from the New York Tribune to join Sherman’s army, Mr. Redpath arrived in South Carolina in time to send the first report of the capture of Charleston to the North. General Sherman having gone forward, Mr. Redpath was appointed to superintend the white and colored schools of that city, and resigned his office as correspondent. During his three or four months’ stay in Charleston he organized all the day schools, and established night schools for adults; he instituted a public reading-room and library for the freedmen, recruited the first colored militia companies, founded an asylum for colored orphans, and established the custom, which has since become national, of decorating the graves of those who fell in the war. He was the founder of Decoration Day. On its first celebration, which occurred in Charleston, S. C., on the first day of May, 1865, upward of ten thousand persons, with a full battalion of soldiers, were present, and advantage was taken of the occasion to consecrate the ground where the martyrs of the Civil War were buried, the ground having been previously enclosed by the colored people of the district. Mr. Redpath was afterward appointed General Superintendent of Education of the Freedmen for the “Department of the South,” which included South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida; but he did not accept the position, as business affairs obliged him to leave that part of the country.

On his return to the North, Mr. Redpath devoted himself exclusively to journalism, and contributed to the leading newspapers of New York and Boston until 1868. In that year he established the Boston Lyceum Bureau—now the Redpath Lyceum Bureau—in conjunction with Mr. George L. Fall, and up to October, 1874, was engaged chiefly in this sphere of labor. The bureau, it is now generally admitted, has done more than any other agency to revive the lecture system, which was rapidly dying out all over the country. Since the establishment of the bureau, the number of lectures given in the United States has increased tenfold, chiefly under the impulse which it gave to the system. It has more than quadrupled the number of lectures that were given in New England when it was organized.

“Jim” Redpath did several first things, to some of which I have already made reference. He was also the first “interviewer” in the United States, as his “interview” (as he called it in the Tribune) with old John Brown, which I witnessed, giving the Puritan leader’s account of the fight with Henry Clay Pate at “Black Jack”—one of the memorable events of the “Free State” struggle—was the earliest of actual newspaper interviews. He afterward popularized this form of getting at public men’s opinions in an easy way by calling those he had early in the Civil War days with Charles Sumner, “Stump Speeches in Slippers.”

As I think of my friend, whose name to the public was perhaps written in water, I wonder why he was not wider, better, and more enduringly known.

Some one has told me of an old clergyman who in his later years had slipped from all organization and yet managed to keep actively engaged in sermonizing and teaching. Some one asked him what church he was “ministering to.” His reply was, “The Church of Divine Fragments.” The last words seem to me always to fit the years and career of James Redpath. His days and his intellect were made indeed of “divine fragments.” Every ethical breath or cause seemed to draw him, but he did not remain to round out either the cause or his own work. But what a lot of service, according to his light, he rendered! The anti-slavery struggle captured his clear-brained youth. His courage, moral and physical alike, was beyond compare. The remarkable series of letters that he wrote, “unsigned,” from the slave States in the winter of 1855-56, of the long journeys “a-foot” that he made among the slaves and non-slave-holding whites, would have made him world-famous could they have fitted to and happened in these days. Then his equally remarkable journeys in Ireland, nearly thirty years later, during the early Land League agitation, the account of which also appeared in the New York Tribune, were almost equal to them for the peril encountered and the high courage displayed. Between these two points Redpath had been the first superintendent of non-racial public schools in Charleston, S. C., and had also been the first Northern journalist to interview Jefferson Davis, whom he invited to a lecture tour in the Union States. His life was full of large beginnings and alive with “divine fragments,” dramatic contrasts, and active with vigorous work, so that while he moved, and where he did so, he for the time being filled the centre of the stage. Yet he has left little behind him, and that little is fading. He published “The Roving Editor,” a record of his audacious journeys and insurrectionary agitation in the seaboard slave States—a book that is quite forgotten and of which copies are not easily to be found. He wrote “The Public Life of John Brown,” which was published within twenty days of the latter’s execution in Virginia, and during the last year of his life he wrote “The Life of Jefferson Davis.”

At one time Redpath entered the service of “The Black Republic”—Hayti—planning an exodus to it of our free colored people and, sub rosa, it has been said, an extended slave insurrection, which Fort Sumter made nugatory. Yet he had no war record, civic or military, except for a brief space as a recruiting officer of colored troops. It is reported that he got possessed with some Tolstoian views against war, yet there never lived a braver man than James Redpath. In his last years he identified himself with Henry George’s single-tax views, after he had been managing editor, under Thorndyke Rice, of The North American Review.

But his enduring public monument is the early shaping of the American lecture-platform system as we now see it, and the enduring personal, even tender regard with which all who knew James Redpath continue to hold him in memory. No man was more loved and admired by those who knew him well. Even those who in later years differed widely from him on personal grounds speak of him still in terms of lingering affection and loving regret.

THE LYCEUM.

THE lyceum platform stands for ability, genius, education, reform, and entertainment. On it the greatest readers, orators, and thinkers have stood. On it reform has found her noblest advocates, literature her finest expression, progress her bravest pleaders, and humor its happiest translations. Some of the most gifted, most highly educated, and warmest-hearted men and women of the English-speaking race have in the last fifty years given their best efforts to the lyceum, and by their noble utterances have made its platform not only historic, but symbolic of talent, education, genius, and reform.

Until the Redpath Lyceum Bureau was founded by James Redpath in Boston, in 1867, lecture committees were in the habit of applying to lecturers or readers direct. These committees were usually made up from the leading citizens of the town, with a view to securing the services of the ablest men and women of letters for the entertainment of their public. The fee was generally nominal, but sufficient to cover the actual expenses of the star and furnish a small honorarium. Edward Everett, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John B. Gough, Wendell Phillips, George William Curtis, Garrison, Sumner, Lowell, Edward Everett Hale, Bayard Taylor, Frederick Douglass, Dr. Chapin, Henry Ward Beecher, Julia Ward Howe, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anna E. Dickinson, and Mary A. Livermore were the principal men and women of letters obtainable on these conditions.

Among the great readers who could attract large metropolitan audiences year after year were George Vandenhoff and James E. Murdoch—famous Shakespearian actors in their day—Professor Churchill of Andover, Prof. Robert R. Raymond, and Charlotte Cushman. All of these were attractions wherever they appeared. Mr. Shillaber (“Mrs. Partington”) as a humorous lecturer was also very popular. Of course there were many lesser lights, but the platform stars available before the war could almost be numbered on one’s fingers.

The lyceum had never been regarded by these gifted advocates of reform and progress from the point of view of “revenue only.” In every city and village there was a lyceum, sustained by the people for the purpose of furnishing the best courses of lectures and entertainments. The expenses for talent being light, and attractions of the highest class being popular, most lyceums were financially prosperous.

At that time music had not been introduced into the courses, which were at once the pride and the boast of every community. Then the music hall and town hall were considered the only proper places for wholesome entertainments, such as concerts and lectures. The religious element predominated in getting up courses of lectures. New England town and public halls were all arranged for lectures and concerts, with an express proviso that no entertainment should be given that required a drop-curtain. A year or two after the war, when over a million men had returned from military strife to civil pursuits, having been through four years of excitement that rendered it next to impossible to settle quietly down, there came an unprecedented demand for entertainments and amusements. The men and women nearest to the hearts of the public were those whose patriotism and ability had made their names household words during the war, and they were sought after for lectures all over the country.

It was about this time (1867) that James Redpath, one of the earliest founders of “The Freedman’s Bureau,” a journalist and father of many brilliant thoughts, conceived the idea of making and booking engagements for lectures. His bureau revolutionized the lyceum and lecture field. It created a profession, and made the management of the work a business requiring skill and systematic care. Redpath was the friend of Phillips, Garrison, Sumner, Gough, Emerson, Whittier, Mrs. Livermore, Mrs. Stanton, Miss Anthony, Anna Dickinson, and other patriotic platform heroes and heroines. Before that time our great lecturers were satisfied to receive from $50 to $100 a night and their expenses. Even John B. Gough never accepted a higher fee. When Charles Sumner was paid $500 for a lecture in Providence, such a fee was unprecedented. Even Wendell Phillips used to lecture for $25 or $50, and seemed to be willing to do so for that sum quite as readily as for $500 afterward. He wished the people to hear him, and he spoke for a cause. One morning Mr. Phillips came into our office in Boston to get his list of appointments. I said:

“Mr. Phillips, we have an open date. Springfield offers $250 for it. Natick wants it, but they can pay only $75.”

“What’s the population of the two towns?” asked Mr. Phillips.

We looked it up, and gave him the census report of each town.

“Natick offers more in proportion to its number of inhabitants than Springfield. Let Natick have it,” he said.

Mr. Redpath satisfied these lecturers that he could save them the trouble and annoyance of voluminous correspondence, and at the same time could obtain such fees as the lectures were worth, a suggestion which seemed to meet with general favor. By paying Redpath ten per cent. on all their business transactions they could be relieved of the care of bookings, and their income would not be diminished, to say the least. Redpath’s Bureau took charge of Mr. Gough’s business, and he cleared $40,000 for the season of 1871 and 1872, and during the last decade of his life his income was never less than $30,000, thus showing what could be done with experience and good management.

Mr. Redpath was the first manager to pay a lecturer a $1,000 fee. He paid it to Mr. Beecher for a lecture in Music Hall, Boston, in 1872. The gross receipts were over $3,000.

When the Redpath Bureau took Wendell Phillips’ business, he could easily get from $250 to $500 a night. There were several men who could command these figures. Men like Beecher, Chapin, Phillips, Sumner, Gough, and Emerson did not lecture merely for the money they made out of it. They put a good deal of love of their ideas, cause, or purposes into their work. There are men now who could make large incomes by lecturing if they would. There are almost daily calls for Seth Low, Chauncey M. Depew, Gen. Horace Porter, Bourke Cockran, and St. Clair McKelway, but they are not available.

Redpath would have been unsuccessful if he had depended upon himself for the management of the details of the business; but he was fortunate in associating with him his friend Mr. George Fall, a man of remarkable executive ability, who at once grasped the magnitude of the scheme and assumed the direction of the business details.

It was to be the Redpath Lyceum Bureau (Redpath & Fall, proprietors). Circulars were sent out over the country announcing the list of lectures to be secured. The newspapers talked about the plan, saying that every city, East and West, could have a lecture course of the best talent in the world by merely addressing the Redpath Lyceum Bureau. In the town in which I lived (Janesville, Wis.), John B. Gough and Anna Dickinson were secured. Each received $400 per night. Tickets sold at from $1 to $5, and the local lyceum cleared about $600, after paying all expenses. It was the same way all over the country. There was not a town which could not afford a great lecturer, but experience and ability were required to secure one.

About this time (1867-68) Petroleum V. Nasby was a great attraction and money-maker. Such a thing as losing money on a big lecture course seemed impossible. Carpenter & Sheldon, managers of the Star Course in Chicago, secured every lecturer and reader that the bureau had at its command, and they paid the highest prices. Their “Chicago Star Course” tickets invariably sold at a premium. Long before the date of the first lecture of the course there was not a ticket to be had. It was the same in Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester, Pittsburg, Columbus, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. Everywhere the star course was the fad. One Sunday in Rochester I attended a Baptist Sunday-school. Two of the prizes for some specially meritorious object were tickets to the Athenæum Star Course, in Corinthian Hall, where the holders could hear John B. Gough, Mary A. Livermore, Mrs. Scott-Siddons, the Rev. George Dawson of England, and the Hon. William Parsons of Ireland, and Ann Eliza Young of Utah. The list of lecturers was printed on the ticket and read off by the superintendent.

T. B. Pugh’s Star Course in Philadelphia was considered a greater property than any theatre in that city. He gave an annual course of ten lectures and concerts, and sold every seat in the great Academy of Music, from orchestra to amphitheatre (all reserved), just as soon as the tickets could possibly be passed out to the waiting crowd. The prices ranged from $3 to $8. It was the same with Hathaway & Pond’s Star Course in Music Hall, Boston, and with the Franklin Lyceum in Providence; in fact, all the large cities looked to the star lecture courses for the highest class of entertainments, and they surely had them. Lyceum treasuries were full, the people were liberal in their patronage, and the public was satisfied. It was a marvellous intellectual movement, and that it no longer exists in this shape must be looked upon with sincere regret by those who watch the progress of the age.

The first hard blow that the lecture platform got was from the clear, humorous light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. People went to hear them who would not previously go to the theatre. To a large extent they took the place of the lecturers in New England, causing the public halls to be remodelled; and the curtain went up where previously it had been forbidden. The fun and the good music were popular, wholesome, and profitable; but when less gifted imitators sent out poor companies, not so clean, with poor music, there was a reaction, and the lecture-concert system began to regain some of its lost ground, and the poor trash of the show business had to go under.

During the years between 1871 and 1877 the lyceum flourished. It began to show weakness in 1874-75. There were not enough good lecturers. The war-horses of the platform were disappearing. Sumner died. Emerson was worn out. Curtis had assumed the editorship of Harper’s Weekly. Gough’s throat was thickening up, and it was an effort to listen to him. Douglass had gone as minister to Hayti. Henry Ward Beecher’s lecture engagements must bend to his church obligations at home. He was a preacher and the pastor of a church. Anna Dickinson got to scolding her audiences; besides, she had a craze for the stage. Mrs. Livermore could lecture only six nights a week. She had over eight hundred applications for a single season, more than she could accept, not only from lyceums, but from churches, colleges, temperance and women’s societies. About the same conditions obtained with Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. There were over five hundred lyceums to be supplied. The great champions of woman’s right had said and told all that there was to say. Nast had abruptly stopped in the very zenith of his popularity. Spurgeon, Gladstone, and John Bright refused to consider fabulous offers inviting them to come to America. There must be something to make the courses attractive or they would go under. It was determined to augment them with music. I went to New York and arranged for a grand concert company to open the principal courses in the large cities. It had to be composed of the leading stars in the profession, and nothing but the very best would do. One season we paid Max Strakosch $10,000 for ten concerts to be given in the leading star courses in Boston, Portland, Providence, Worcester, Springfield, Hartford, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. That company consisted of Clara Louise Kellogg, Anna Louise Cary, George Conley, basso, Brignoli, tenor, Alfred Pease, pianist, George W. Colby, accompanist. We used one of these concerts for the star course in Boston. I ran one independently on Sunday night in the Boston theatre. They were sold to each of the other courses for $200 more than we paid Strakosch. It was the finest vocal quartette available in America, and I would like to see it “bested” now under conditions similar to those then existing.

Next came a great lyceum star, Ole Bull, the most popular violinist ever known. His name assured the success of almost any course where there was an auditorium of ample capacity. I paid him $500 a concert every time he played for me. The great Norwegian “fiddler,” as musicians called him, had not appeared in public for several years. It was almost accidental that I secured him. He was at the Parker House, Boston, on his way from his home in Norway to Madison, Wis., his American home. I met him in the elevator, and asked if he were not going to play in Boston. His wife, who was with him, replied that he would not play in Boston until he could receive $500 a concert. Boston had never appreciated him.