wave of his hand towards me, "they are coming back."

There was no laughter. An English audience is nothing if not literal;
and they are as polite as they are literal. They understood that
I was a reformed criminal and as such they gave me a hearty burst
of applause.

But there is just one thing that I would like to chronicle here in
favour of the chairman and in gratitude for his assistance. Even
at his worst he is far better than having no chairman at all. Over
in England a great many societies and public bodies have adopted
the plan of "cutting out the chairman." Wearying of his faults,
they have forgotten the reasons for his existence and undertaken
to do without him.

The result is ghastly. The lecturer steps up. on to the platform
alone and unaccompanied. There is a feeble ripple of applause; he
makes his miserable bow and explains with as much enthusiasm as he
can who he is. The atmosphere of the thing is so cold that an 'Arctic
expedition isn't in it with it. I found also the further difficulty
that in the absence of the chairman very often the audience, or a
large part of it, doesn't know who the lecturer is. On many occasions
I received on appearing a wild burst of applause under the impression
that I was somebody else. I have been mistaken in this way for Mr.
Briand, then Prime Minister of France, for Charlie Chaplin, for Mrs.
Asquith,--but stop, I may get into a libel suit. All I mean is that
without a chairman "we celebrities" get terribly mixed up together.

To one experience of my tour as a lecturer I shall always be able to
look back with satisfaction. I nearly had the pleasure of killing a