“I shall telegraph you to-morrow if I intend to return at once. Don’t let this worry you, but kiss the children for me and hope for the best. I would send you some money but there isn’t any to send, and maybe I shall only bring back myself.—Your affectionate
“Frank.
“P. S.—26th.
“Dear Nan,—I did not send this yesterday, waiting to find the result of last night’s lecture. It was a fair house and —— this morning paid me one hundred and fifty dollars, of which I send you the greater part. I lecture again to-night, with fair prospects, and he is to pay something on account of the Ottawa engagement besides the fee for that night. I will write again from Ogdensburg.—Always yours,
“Frank.”
This lecture trip in the Spring of 1873 was followed in the Autumn by a similar trip in the West, with lectures at St. Louis, Topeka, Atchison, Lawrence, and Kansas City. From St. Louis he wrote to his wife as follows:—
“My dear Anna,—As my engagement is not until the 21st at Topeka, Kansas, I lie over here until to-morrow morning, in preference to spending the extra day in Kansas. I’ve accepted the invitation of Mr. Hodges, one of the managers of the lecture course, to stay at his house. He is a good fellow, with the usual American small family and experimental housekeeping, and the quiet and change from the hotel are very refreshing to me. They let me stay in my own room—which by the way is hung with the chintz of our 49th Street house—and don’t bother me with company. So I was very good to-day and went to church. There was fine singing. The contralto sang your best sentences from the Te Deum, ‘We believe that Thou shalt come,’ &c., &c., to the same minor chant that I used to admire.
“The style of criticism that my lecture—or rather myself as a lecturer—has received, of which I send you a specimen, culminated this morning in an editorial in the ‘Republic,’ which I shall send you, but have not with me at present. I certainly never expected to be mainly criticised for being what I am not, a handsome fop; but this assertion is at the bottom of all the criticism. They may be right—I dare say they are—in asserting that I am no orator, have no special faculty for speaking, no fire, no dramatic earnestness or expression, but when they intimate that I am running on my good looks—save the mark! I confess I get hopelessly furious. You will be amused to hear that my gold studs have again become ‘diamonds,’ my worn-out shirts ‘faultless linen,’ my haggard face that of a ‘Spanish-looking exquisite,’ my habitual quiet and ‘used-up’ way, ‘gentle and eloquent languor.’ But you will be a little astonished to know that the hall I spoke in was worse than Springfield, and notoriously so—that the people seemed genuinely pleased, that the lecture inaugurated the ‘Star’ course very handsomely, and that it was the first of the first series of lectures ever delivered in St. Louis.”
In a letter dated Lawrence, Kansas, October 23, 1873, he relates an interesting experience.
“My dear Anna,—I left Topeka—which sounds like a name Franky might have invented—early yesterday morning, but did not reach Atchison, only sixty miles distant, until seven o’clock at night—an hour before the lecture. The engine as usual had broken down, and left me at four o’clock fifteen miles from Atchison, on the edge of a bleak prairie with only one house in sight. But I got a saddle-horse—there was no vehicle to be had—and strapping my lecture and blanket to my back I gave my valise to a little yellow boy—who looked like a dirty terra-cotta figure—with orders to follow me on another horse, and so tore off towards Atchison. I got there in time; the boy reached there two hours after.