between the various groups of the anti-slavery
party represented by such men as Gerrit Smith, Wendell
Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, John Parker Hale,
Samuel Joseph May, and Frederick Douglass. They took
strong hold upon me and gave me a higher idea of a man's
best work in life. That was the bloom period of the old
popular lecture. It was the time when lectures were
expected to build character and increase knowledge; the
sensation and buffoon business which destroyed the system
had not yet come in. I feel to this hour the good
influence of lectures then heard, in the old City Hall at
Syracuse, from such men as President Mark Hopkins,
Bishop Alonzo Potter, Senator Hale of New Hampshire,
Emerson, Ware, Whipple, and many others.

As to recreative reading at this period, the author who
exercised the strongest influence over me was Charles
Kingsley. His novels ``Alton Locke'' and ``Yeast''
interested me greatly in efforts for doing away with old
abuses in Europe, and his ``Two Years After'' increased
my hatred for negro slavery in America. His ``Westward
Ho!'' extended my knowledge of the Elizabethan
period and increased my manliness. Of this period, too,
was my reading of Lowell's Poems, many of which I
greatly enjoyed. His ``Biglow Papers'' were a perpetual
delight; the dialect was familiar to me since, in the
little New England town transplanted into the heart of
central New York, in which I was born, the less educated
people used it, and the dry and droll Yankee expressions
of our ``help'' and ``hired man'' were a source of