My first contact with Major Pond was as a consumer of the things he had to sell, and I came soon to learn that the stamp of his approval was the hallmark of excellence. The major's imprint upon a circular was enough for me, and in several years of our relation as buyer and seller he never failed me; and the merest cursory glance at the list of men and women for whom he stood sponsor in the lyceum field shows why. It was a marvelous galaxy of humans, many of them now passed imperishably into the pages of history, for whom the major did yeoman service in this country, beginning with Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and Henry Ward Beecher, and ending with Matthew Arnold, Henry M. Stanley, Julia Ward Howe and that Prince among men, the never-to-be-forgotten John Watson, dear to the hearts of readers everywhere as Ian Maclaren.
The service of the manager of the Major Pond type was not a mere perfunctory business service only, but was of a more or less intimate personal nature as well. The major was not content to make a booking for a celebrity at some distant, well nigh inaccessible point, and then shoot him out into the dark unknown to take care of himself, and get along as best he might. On the contrary, he went along himself when he could, and what hardships were to be faced he shared, and those that might be staved off by a little kindly care and foresight he shielded his people from. It was thus that he built up not only the most notable list of lecturers the world has yet known, but at the same time surrounded himself with a circle of gallant friends, who came to think of him with rare affection.
This intimate personal contact with men of unusual distinction gave him a fund of reminiscence that was a never-failing source of delight to his friends. To Mr. Gladstone, Pond's stories were so tremendously appealing that during one of the major's visits to London the great British statesman requested permission to have a stenographer take them down just as they fell from the lips of the picturesque old American. Concerning Henry Ward Beecher and Mark Twain the major could talk forever, and the little sidelights his fund of anecdote concerning them cast upon the personality of these two men were invariably appealing.
Worn by the nervous strain of a hard bit of lecturing before the major's own friends and neighbors one night many years ago, I was privileged to sit and gather refreshment and peace of mind in the joy of one of the major's reminiscent monologues lasting well into the early hours of the morning, with which he regaled me upon my return to his hospitable house. I was unhappily conscious of not having done my work particularly well that night—in fact I had had to lecture from a manuscript, which is always fatiguing both to speaker and to audience, and I hardly dared ask the major what he thought of my performance—but after awhile in his fatherly way he broached the subject himself.
"It was a good lecture, Bangs," he said, "and some day, maybe, you will find time to make it shorter."
"What is a good lecture, Major, anyhow?" I asked, hoping that from such an authority as he must by now have become I should get some clue to a possible short cut, if not to success, at least away from failure.
He threw himself back in his chair and laughed. "That reminds me, Bangs," said he. "Maybe you'd like to know what Horace Greeley considered a good lecture—at any rate it is the only answer to your question that I know. Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher and I were on our way to Boston once, and as we passed through Bridgeport, Connecticut, Greeley, glancing out of the car window, said, 'Hello, here's Bridgeport, the home of P. T. Barnum! Nice town, Beecher. I gave a successful lecture here once.'
"'What do you call a successful lecture, Greeley?' asked Mr. Beecher.
"'Why,' said Greeley, 'a successful lecture is where more people stay in than go out.'"
As for the major's relations with Mark Twain, there was always so much of the spirit of pranksome boyhood in them both that their days together, when Clemens was so bravely working to clear off the indebtedness of the publishing house that he had unnecessarily but chivalrously assumed as his own, must have been something of a romp, despite the unquestioned hardships of such persistent travel.