of the great, yet he was a sad man when he wrote “My Summer in a Garden,” and it all seems a mystery how he could in such grief have written that remarkable little tale.  This sadness is often associated with humorists.  Mr. Shaw was one of the saddest men I ever met.  Why, he cried on the slightest occasion.  I went one day to interview him in Boston, and Mr. Shepard, his publisher, said “Please don’t trouble Josh Billings now.”  “What is the matter?” “Oh, he is crying again,” said Mr. Shepard.  I asked him how Mr. Shaw could write such funny things as he did.  He then showed me the manuscript (which Mr. Shaw had just placed on his desk and which he had just written), in which he says, “I do not know any cure for laziness, but I have known a second wife to hurry it up some.”  Artemus Ward wrote the most laughable things while his heart was in the deepest wretchedness.  Often these glimpses of the funny men whose profession would seem to show them to be the happiest of earth’s people, prove that they are sometimes the most gloomy and miserable.

John B. Gough, the great temperance orator, the greatest the world has ever seen, said to me one evening at his home that he would lecture for forty years, and then would stop.  But his wife said, “Now, John, you know you won’t give it up.”  He assented, “Yes, I will.”  But his wife said, “No you won’t.  You men when you drink of public life find it like a drink of whiskey, and you are just like the rest of the men.”  “No,” said he.  Then Mr. Gough told again his familiar story of the minister who was preaching in his pulpit in Boston when he saw the Governor of the State coming up the aisle.  Immediately he began to stammer, and finally said:  “I see the Governor coming in, and as I know you will want to hear an exhortation from him, I think that I had better stop.”  Then one of the old officials leaped up from one of the front seats and said, “I insist upon your going on with your sermon, sir; you ought not be embarrassed by the Governor’s coming in.  We are all worms!  All worms! nothing but worms!” Then the minister was angry and shouted:  “Sir, I would have you understand that there is a difference in worms.”  Mr. Gough said he was different from other people yet the years came and went, and he stayed on the public platform.  One night a committee from Frankford, Philadelphia, asked me to write him and ask him to lecture for them.  I wrote and whether my influence had anything to do with it or not, I do not know, but he came from New York and when he was in about the middle of his lecture, he came to that sentence, “Young man, keep your record clear, for a single glass of intoxicating liquor may somewhere, in after years, change into a horrid monster that shall carry you down to woe.”  And when he had uttered that wonderful sentence of advice, he slopped to get breath, reached for a drink of water, swung forward and fell over.  The doctor said he was too late for any earthly aid, and John B. Gough, with his armor on, went on into Glory.  He never found that earthly rest he had promised himself.  His garden never showed its flowers, and his fields were never strewn with grain.