That was as long a speech as Tom Coram ever made.
But it was pointed. The small audience tapped applause.

Orcutt looked at me, and I nodded. "I will be
another, of the twenty men," cried he. "And I another,"
said an old bluff Englishman, whom nobody had invited;
who proved to be a Mr. Robert Boll, a Sheffield man, who
came in from curiosity. He stopped after the meeting;
said he should leave the country the next week, and I
have never seen him since. But his bill of exchange came
all the same.

That was all the public subscribing. Enough more
than we had hoped for. We tried to make Coram treasurer,
but he refused. We had to make Haliburton treasurer,
though we should have liked a man better known than he
then was. Then we adjourned. Some nice ladies then came
up, and gave, one a dollar, and one five dollars, and one
fifty, and so on,--and some men who have stuck by ever
since. I always, in my own mind, call each of those
women Damaris, and each of those men Dionysius. But
those are not their real names.

How I am wasting time on an old story! Then some of
these ladies came the next day and proposed a fair; and
out of that, six months after, grew the great Longitude
Fair, that you will all remember, if you went to it, I am
sure. And the papers the next day gave us first-rate
reports; and then, two by two, with our subscription-