He naturally became a prey to the usual autograph-hunter. The "Theodore Parker Fraternity" determined to utilise the demand for his signature by procuring a supply for their "Fair," and Wendell Phillips undertook to beg them, which he did in the following letter:—
"23rd October '73.
"Dear Sir,—The 'Theodore Parker Fraternity'—all the Church he allowed—hold a Fair, beginning October 27. At Mrs Parker's table she sells autographs—and wants some of yours. Now please write your name on the enclosed cards—a motto or sentiment also if you choose—and re-mail them to me, then I'll thank you, and earn their thanks also—and forgive you that you gave Mrs Sargent a photograph of yourself and forgot me!
"I hope you find crowds everywhere as cordial as those you gathered here—and where, as at Cambridge, if you don't happen on a crowd, I trust you may have one such hearer as you had there—Henry James, equal to about 1800 common folk—who was wholly carried away.—
Yours,
Wendell Phillips.
"Mr C. Bradlaugh."
Wendell Philips also presided at Mr Bradlaugh's second lecture in Boston, and again the audience was said to include some of the brightest intellects in New England. Amongst the visitors who came the next day to congratulate him on his success was William Lloyd Garrison, who, like Sumner, was one of my father's "great men." These Boston lectures produced an even greater sensation, and a revulsion of feeling in his favour more complete, than those delivered in New York.
After lecturing in the New England States, where I gather that many of the lectures originally contemplated had to be cut out in consequence of the distress occasioned by the financial panic, Mr Bradlaugh went west. He visited amongst other places Buffalo, Cincinnati (where the Roman Catholic Archbishop Purcell was amongst his auditors), St Louis, and Kansas, and at each place the newspapers waged fierce warfare after his departure. He reached Kansas in December, two days after the suspension of the chief bank in that city, and here he met with a somewhat serious accident. In passing along one of the inclines of the city, he slipped backwards on the frozen ground, and throwing out his right hand to save his back, he tore a piece out of the palm, and deeply gashed his wrist.[184] He was unable to get the wound properly dressed in Kansas, and as he had to be continually travelling and lecturing in the severe cold (about 6°), the injury was greatly aggravated, and it was many months before the wound was properly healed and without pain. While lecturing he suffered intensely, and when, as sometimes happened, some gesture or movement would set the wound bleeding afresh, it was, in addition, extremely inconvenient. The pain, at times exceedingly acute, rendered him abnormally irritable, and he afterwards told us one or two amusing stories of his trials and his temper at this time. At one place amongst his audience were a young lady, an elderly lady, whom he set down as the maiden aunt of the younger, and a young gentlemen, whom he assumed to be the young lady's lover. The young people kept up a continual flow of conversation, until, almost frantic with pain from his wound (which was also bleeding so freely that he was obliged to keep his hand raised all the evening), he stopped short in his lecture, and turning to the young people said, amidst profound silence, "If that young lady and young gentleman prefer their conversation to my lecture, I should be greatly obliged if they would continue it outside." The "aunt," he told us, looked daggers at the poor girl, and the culprits themselves did not dare to so much as exchange another glance during the rest of the evening; they looked so uncomfortable that he felt quite sorry for them, and repented of his irritability. At another place, where it was exceedingly cold, the man in charge of the stoves took the opportunity to thrust in huge logs with a great noise whenever he was unusually pathetic. He says that he bore with this as Job could not have borne with it had he been tempted to lecture there, but at last even his patience was exhausted, and he thundered out "words of affectionate remonstrance, which effectually prevented any more wood being used that evening."
Shortly after this he was at Chicago, and was amazed to see how the city had recovered from the recent fire; the spectacle of the magnificent buildings seemed like reopening a page from "Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp." Just before entering the lecture hall he saw a face he hardly recognised. "It was one I had not seen for a quarter of a century," he said. "'Don't you know me, Mr Bradlaugh?' was the greeting, and the voice seemed more familiar than the face. My memory went back to the days when food was short, and when I shared the scanty meal with the questioner, her mother, and her sister at Warner Place; but twenty-five years had sufficiently blotted the memory and blurred the page to confuse me in the recognition. Half-hesitatingly, I said, 'I am not quite sure; I think it is Hypatia.' I was wrong, however; it was her sister Theophila. And thus, after so long a time, I was again brought face to face with the daughters of one to whom the English freethought party in great measure owe the free press and free platforms we use to-day." He only stayed in Chicago one night, and had but a short interview with his old friends; yet even that brief glimpse of them brought him a throb of pain, "for," he said, "I could not help wondering whether, thirty years after my death, my own daughters might be in a strange land so entirely overlooked" as these ladies were.