Mercantile Hall, in Summer Street, was engaged for me,—­it being central, modest in point of size, commodious, and favorably known.  At this time I was in excellent health and weighed one hundred and forty-three pounds.  But from the moment of the public announcement of my lecture, my appetite for food, for meat particularly, began to fail me.  “How peevish and irritable he is growing!” I heard one member of the family remark to another.  Soon the grocer’s scales indicated that my weight was diminishing.  It fell to one hundred and forty-one,—­then to one hundred and forty,—­then to one hundred and thirty-eight,—­and finally, when the 30th of May arrived, I found I weighed only one hundred and thirty-four pounds!

The crisis was now at hand.  Do not laugh at me, ye self-assured ones, with your comfortable sense of your own powers,—­ye who care as little for an audience as for a field of cabbages,—­do not jeer at one who has felt the pangs of shyness and quailed under the imaginary terrors of a first public appearance.  For you it may be a small matter to face an audience,—­that nearest approximation to the many-headed monster which we can palpably encounter; but for one whose diffidence had become the standard of that quality to his acquaintances the venture was perilous and desperate, as the sequel showed.

Never had time rolled by with such fearful velocity as on that eventful day.  Breakfast was hardly over before preparations were being made for dinner.  Small appetite had I for either.  Before I had finished pacing the parlor there was a summons to tea.  It was like the summons to the criminal:  “Rise up, Master Barnardine, and be hanged.”  With a most shallow affectation of nonchalance I sat down at the table.  A child might have detected my agitation; and yet, with horrible insincerity, I alluded to the news of the day, and asked the family why they were all so silent.  They saw from my look that they might as well have joked with a man on his way to execution.

Having dressed and adorned myself for the sacrifice, I returned to the parlor, when the rumbling of coach-wheels, the sudden letting down of steps, and then a frightfully discordant ring of the doorbell, sent the blood from my cheeks and made my heart palpitate like a trip-hammer.  “Is th-th-that the off-officer,—­I mean the coachman?” I stammered.  Yes, there was no doubt about it.

Straightening my person, I affected a dignified calmness, and assured my dear, anxious mother that I was not in the least nervous,—­oh, not in the least!

It was a gloomy night, and the streets wore a dismal aspect.  The hall was distant about three miles; but in some mysterious manner, or by some route which I have never been able to discover, the coachman seemed to abridge the distance to less than half a mile.  We are in Summer Street,—­before the door.  Some juvenile amateurs, attracted by stories of the strong man, surround the carriage to get a sight of him.