Bangs John Kendrick - From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book стр 20.

In view of all this apparent prosperity I was a trifle surprised when the chairman arrived at the hotel to find him rather depressed. He was a clergyman, and at first glance seemed to be suffering from profound melancholy; so very profound indeed that I deemed it my duty to try to cheer him up.

"What a fine, prosperous little city you have here, Doctor," said I with genuine enthusiasm. "I've put in the greater part of the afternoon looking the place over, and I tell you it has filled me with joy."

"Humph!" said he gloomily. "It looks prosperous, but it ain't ! It's a bank-made town. The banks got here first, and induced people to come and settle on easy terms, and the terms haven't turned out quite so easy as they might. There's hardly a man in this town that isn't up to his chin in debt."

"Oh, well, what of that?" said I, still resolved to win out on a tolerably hopeless proposition. "Of course debt is a bad thing; but sometimes it acts as a spur. Your people are a bright and brainy looking lot. It won't take them long to settle up."

"Oh, they look bright and brainy," he returned sadly; "but they ain't ! There isn't one man in ten 'll understand a half of what you say to them to-night."

"Look here, Doctor!" said I, beginning to wax a trifle chilly myself, especially in the regions of my pedal extremities. "What are you trying to do, discourage me?"

"Oh, no," he replied, with a mournful shake of his head. "If I'd been trying to discourage you, I'd have told you about our lecture hall. It's without any exception the meanest thing of its kind on the American continent. Why," he added, holding out his hands in a gesture of utter despair, "why, if we had a lecture hall that was only halfway decent, we could afford to have somebody out here to talk to us that would be worth listening to! "

The chairman who in the exuberance of his own eloquence forgets the name of the individual he is introducing, even though he has announced that that name is a "household word," is no creature of the imagination, and if the stories that are told of him seem hackneyed, it is not because they are so frequently told, but because they happen so frequently in the experience of all platform speakers, and in almost identical manner. Even so well known a man as Mr. Bryan has suffered from this, one enthusiastic admirer in New York having once, after a skyscraping peroration, led up with climacteric force to the name of "our Peerless Leader, William J. Brennings ."

In my own platform experience I have had chairmen come to me at the last moment and confess with most childlike frankness that they have never heard of me before, asking me to help them out because they really didn't know "what in Tophet to say." One individual out on the Pacific Coast approached me one night about ten minutes before the lecture was scheduled to begin, and revealed to me his terrible embarrassment over this latter situation.

"I didn't know until half an hour ago that I was to present you to our people to-night," said he, "and to tell the honest truth, Mr. Bangs, I never heard of you before . Will you please tell me who you are, and what you are, and why you are? And is there anything pleasant I can say about you in introducing you to your audience?"

"Well," said I, "if I had known I was to have the privilege of preparing the obituary notice you are to deliver over my prostrate

And then he came to my subject.

"And to-night, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "Mr. Bangs has come to us to give us his famous lecture on ahem on er he has come, I say, to give us his inimitable talk on er on er "

I leaned forward, and tried to give it to him in a stage whisper; but was too late. His impetus carried him on to destruction.

" his delightful talk on Lubricators He Has Met," said he.

Without any jealousies let me confess that that observation was truly the hit of the evening. The bulk of the audience had been themselves so mystified by the possible significance of the word Salubrities that they knew the title by heart, and we began the evening with a roar of laughter that made us all friends at once. And as a matter of fact no harm was done; for "Lubricators I Have Met" was quite as good a title as the other, for my Salubrities are men and women who have made the world happier, and better, and sweeter, by their kindliness and graciousness, and what in the world could be more fitting than that the people who do that should be called Lubricators?

IX CHANCE ACQUAINTANCES

It does not happen often here in the East that we make friends "by rail." Possibly it is because the distances traversed are comparatively short. Perhaps too it is due to the Eastern Reserve, which is a State of Mind, just as the Western Reserve has become several States of Being. I know that the democratic Westerner traveling in the East finds us apparently cold and unresponsive; though I doubt we are really so. We are merely hurried, and possibly worried; too preoccupied to notice the many little opportunities for friendly intercourse that a railway journey presents.