CHAPTER XVIII.
St. Johnsbury—The State of Maine—New England Self-Control—Cold Climates and Frigid Audiences—Where is the Audience?—All Drunk!—A Reminiscence of a Scotch Audience on a Saturday Night.
St. Johnsbury (Vt.), January 28.
St. Johnsbury is a charming little town perched on the top of a mountain, from which a lovely scene of hills and woods can be enjoyed. The whole country is covered with snow, and as I looked at it in the evening by the electric light, the effect was very beautiful. The town has only six thousand inhabitants, eleven hundred of whom came to hear my lecture to-night. Which is the European town of six thousand inhabitants that would supply an audience of eleven hundred people to a literary causerie?
St. Johnsbury has a dozen churches, a public library of 15,000 volumes, with a reading-room beautifully fitted with desks and perfectly adapted for study. A museum, a Young Men’s Christian Association, with gymnasium, school-rooms, reading-rooms, play-rooms, and a lecture hall capable of accommodating over 1000 people. Who, after that, would consider himself an exile if he had to live in St. Johnsbury? There is more intellectual life in it than in any French town outside of Paris and about a dozen more large cities.
.......
Portsea, January 30.