Mr. Tennyson told me that he would not exchange his home, walled in as it was like a fortress for Windsor Castle or the throne of the Queen.

Mr. Carnegie said to me only a few months ago that if a man owned his home and had his health he had all the money that man needed to be as happy as any person can be.  Mr. Carnegie was right about that.

Empress Eugenie, in 1870, was said to be the happiest woman in France.  I saw her in the Tuilleres at a gorgeous banquet and a few years after, when her husband had been captured, her son killed and she was a widow, at the Chislehurst Cottage, I said to her, “The last time I saw you in that beautiful palace you were said to be the happiest woman in the world.”  “Sir,” she said, “I am far happier now than I was then.”  It was a statement that for a long time I could not understand.

I caught a glimpse of Garibaldi weeping because he did not go back with his wife, Anita, to South America.

I visited Charles Dickens at his home and asked him to come to America again and read from his books, but Mr. Dickens said “No, I will never cross the ocean; I will not go even to London.  When I die, I am to be buried out there on the lawn,” and he pointed out the place to me.  A few weeks later I hired a custodian to let me in early at the rear gate of Westminster Abbey, for Parliament had changed Mr. Dickens’s will in one respect, and provided that he should not be buried on the lawn of his cottage, but instead in Westminster Abbey, but they made no other change in his will.  There I looked on the fifteen men, all whom the will allowed to be present at his funeral, who were bearing all that was mortal of Charles Dickens to his rest, and I heard Dean Stanley say “While Mr. Dickens lived, his loss was our gain; but now his gain is our loss.”  When he uttered that great truth, very condensed, in that beautiful language, he showed that human life in the public service of one’s fellow men may be nothing more or less than continual sacrifice.

My friends, if you are called to public service; if you have influence that you can use for the public good, do not hesitate to go if you are SURE that DUTY calls you.  But if, instead, no voice of God, no call of mankind, doth require that you go out and give up the best of life for your fellows, remember how fortunate you are.  If you can go to your home at evening and read your paper in peace, and rest undisturbed, do so, and remember that you have reached the very height of personal happiness.  Then seek no farther, count thyself happy and go no farther than God shall call you.  For the happiest man is not famous, nor rich, but he who hath his loved ones in an undisturbed peace around.  Remember what Wendell Phillips said, “All within this gate is Paradise; all without it is MARTYDROM.”

I had a glimpse of Generals Grant and Sheridan wrestling like boys, over a box of cigars sent into General Grant’s tent.  They were boys again.