One might start a great many principles and ideas which would require to be illustrated and drawn out in order to present a picture of my feelings at the present moment.  I am conscious that in my immediate vicinity there are people who were great when I was little.  I remember very well when I was unknown to anybody, how I was sent to report a lecture by my friend right opposite, Mr. George Alfred Townsend, and I remember the manner in which he said:  “Galileo said:  ‘The world moves round,’ and the world does move round,” upon the platform of the Mercantile Hall in St. Louis—­one of the grandest things out. [Laughter and applause.] The next great occasion that I had to come before the public was Mark Twain’s lecture on the Sandwich Islands, which I was sent to report.  And when I look to my left here I see Colonel Anderson, whose very face gives me an idea that Bennett has got some telegraphic despatch and is just about to send me to some terrible region for some desperate commission. [Laughter.]

And, of course, you are aware that it was owing to the proprietor and editor of a newspaper that I dropped the pacific garb of a journalist and donned the costume of an African traveller.  It was not for me, one of the least in the newspaper corps, to question the newspaper proprietor’s motives.  He was an able editor, very rich, desperately despotic. [Laughter.] He commanded a great army of roving writers, people of fame in the news-gathering world; men who had been everywhere and had seen everything from the bottom of the Atlantic to the top of the very highest mountain; men who were as ready to give their advice to National Cabinets [laughter] as they were ready to give it to the smallest police courts in the United States. [Laughter.] I belonged to this class of roving writers, and I can truly say that I did my best to be conspicuously great in it, by an untiring devotion to my duties, an untiring indefatigability, as though the ordinary rotation of the universe depended upon my single endeavors. [Laughter.] If, as some of you suspect, the enterprise of the able editor was only inspired with a view to obtain the largest circulation, my unyielding and guiding motive, if I remember rightly, was to win his favor by doing with all my might that duty to which according to the English State Church Catechism, “it had pleased God to call me.” [Laughter and applause.]

He first despatched me to Abyssinia—­straight from Missouri to Abyssinia!  What a stride, gentlemen! [Laughter.] People who lived west of the Missouri River have scarcely, I think, much knowledge of Abyssinia, and there are gentlemen here who can vouch for me in that, but it seemed to Mr. Bennett a very ordinary thing, and it seemed to his agent in London a very ordinary thing indeed, so I of course followed suit.  I took it as a very ordinary thing, and I went to Abyssinia, and somehow or other good-luck followed me and my telegrams reporting the fall of Magdala happened to be a week ahead of the British Government’s.  The people said I had done right well, though the London papers said I was an impostor. [Laughter.]