fell into that same foolishness.  This boy was an officer, and those were only private soldiers.  I learned a lesson that I will never forget.  Greatness consists not in holding some office; greatness really consists in doing some great deed with little means, in the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private ranks of life; that is true greatness.  He who can give to this people better streets, better homes, better schools, better churches, more religion, more of happiness, more of God, he that can be a blessing to the community in which he lives to-night will be great anywhere, but he who cannot be a blessing where he now lives will never be great anywhere on the face of God’s earth.  “We live in deeds, not years, in feeling, not in figures on a dial; in thoughts, not breaths; we should count time by heart throbs, in the cause of right.”  Bailey says:  “He most lives who thinks most.”

If you forget everything I have said to you, do not forget this, because it contains more in two lines than all I have said.  Bailey says:  “He most lives who thinks most, who feels the noblest, and who acts the best.”

“PERSONAL GLIMPSES OF CELEBRATED MEN AND WOMEN."[A]

[Footnote A:  Stenographic report by A. Russell Smith, Sec’y.]

When I had been lecturing forty years, which is now four years ago, the Lecture Bureau suggested that before I retire from the public platform, that I should prepare one subject and deliver it through the country.  For I had told the Bureau thirty years ago that when I had lectured forty years, I would retire.  They therefore suggested a talk on this topic, “Personal Glimpses of Celebrated Men and Women.”  But a death in our family which destroyed the homeness of our house produced such an effect upon us that after the forty years came we found that we would rather wander than stay at home, and consequently we are traveling still, and will do so until the end.  This explanation will show why many of these things are said.  For I must necessarily bring myself often into this topic, sometimes unpleasantly to myself.  Mark Twain says, that the trouble with an old man is that he “remembers so many things that ain’t so,” and with Mark Twain’s caution in my ears, I will try to give you these “Personal Glimpses of Celebrated Men and Women.”

I do not claim to be a very intimate friend of great men.  But a fly may look at an elephant, and for this reason we may glance at the great men and women whom I have seen through the many years of public life.  Sometimes those glimpses give us a better idea of the real man or woman than an entire biography written while he was living would do; and to-night as a grandfather would bring his grandchildren to his knee and tell them of his little experiences, so let me tell to you these incidents in a life now so largely lived out.