“My poor boy, you’re in hard luck, and I’m going to give you all the help I can. If there’s an excuse for a laugh, you’re going to get it.”
My heart swelled and went out to him; although I had much to think of at the moment, business being business and I about to put my wedge into it for the first time in an English drawing-room, I mentally vowed that if ever I met that man again he should know what a tower of strength he had been to me. I “spread myself,” I “laid myself out,” and was told afterward that I had succeeded. My own view-point of success was reached next morning, when I received his lordship’s check.
Several weeks afterward, at a dinner given to Henry Irving, I saw again the kind face that had been a world of encouragement to me. At the earliest possible opportunity I went over to him and said:
“I want to thank you for helping me at a very trying moment.”
Through forgetfulness or modesty he appeared not to remember the affair, so I detailed the circumstance to him. He expressed delight at having been of any service to me, and confessed that he was a fellow professional, and could therefore imagine my feelings when first face to face with an English audience. I asked him what he was doing; he replied that he was at the Princess Theatre with Mr. Wilson Barrett. I begged him to let me knew his whereabouts whenever he came to the United States, so that I might renew my expressions of gratitude and be of any possible service to him. He promised, but just as I was taking leave of him it occurred to me that I did not even know his name, so I asked for it. He replied:
“My name is Willard—Edward S. Willard.”
We became quite close friends in the course of years, although Mr. Willard did not come to America until 1891. Soon after his arrival I gave a breakfast at Delmonico’s in his honor and ransacked the city and vicinity for fine fellows to meet him. Among the guests were Gen. W. T. Sherman, Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, George W. Childs, editor of the Philadelphia Ledger; Whitelaw Reid, editor-in-chief of the New York Tribune; Hugh J. Grant, Mayor of New York; Chauncey M. Depew, president of the New York Central Railway Company and his secretary Captain Henry Du Val; Hon. Daniel Dougherty, the most brilliant member of the Philadelphia bar; theatre managers Augustin Daly, A. M. Palmer, Frank Sanger, Henry E. Abbey, and Daniel Frohman; Joseph I. C. Clarke, editor of the Morning Journal; Foster Coates, editor of the Mail and Express; St. Clair McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn Union; J. M. Stoddart, manager of Lippincott’s Magazine; Chester A. Lord, managing editor of the New York Sun; Bradford Merrill, managing editor of the New York World; Arthur Bowers managing editor of New York Tribune; Joseph Howard, Jr., America’s most noted newspaper correspondent; Col. T. P. Ochiltree, the world’s most effective impromptu story teller; John Russell Young, editor, librarian of the congressional library and ex-minister to China; Major Moses P. Handy, journalist, club president and United States Commissioner to the Paris exposition; William Edgar Nye (Bill Nye, the humorist); Sam Sothern, brother of E. H. Sothern the actor; W. J. Arkell, manager of Puck and Leslie’s Weekly; Harrison Gray Fiske, editor Dramatic Mirror; Col. W. F. Cody (“Buffalo Bill”); W. J. Florence, the comedian, Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal and also the most quoted editor in America, and Joseph Hatton the noted English author.
Toward the end of the breakfast I said:
“Gentlemen, I should like to tell you the story of a poor boy and an actor and the kindness the actor showed the poor boy.” I then related, in the third person, the story of my first evening as an entertainer in London, and concluded with: