In Cleveland, where I gave a series of talks, President Cutler, of Adelbert University, rose at the close of the last lecture and, looking genially towards me, made this acknowledgment:  “I am free to confess that I have often been charmed by a woman, and occasionally instructed, but never before have I been charmed and instructed by the same woman.”

Cleveland showed even then the spirit of the Cleveland of today, which is putting that city in the very first rank of the cities not only of the United States but of the world in civic improvement and municipal progress, morally and physically.  Each night of my lectures I was entertained at a different house while there, and as a trifle to show their being in advance of other cities, I noticed that the ladies wore wigs to suit their costumes.  That only became the fashion here last winter, but I saw no ultra colours such as we saw last year, green and pink and blue, but only those that suited their style and their costume.

At Chicago I was the guest of Mrs. H.O.  Stone, who gave me a dinner and an afternoon reception, where I met many members of various clubs, and the youngest grandmothers I had ever seen.  At a lunch given for me by Mrs. Locke, wife of Rev. Clinton B. Locke, I met Mrs. Potter Palmer, Mrs. Wayne MacVeagh, and Mrs. Williams, wife of General Williams, and formerly the wife of Stephen Douglas.  Mrs. Locke was the best raconteur of any woman I have ever heard.  Dartmouth men drove me to all the show places of that wonderful city.  Lectured in Rev. Dr. Little’s church parlors.  He was not only a New Hampshire man, but born in Boscawen, New Hampshire, where my grandfather lived, and where my mother lived until her marriage.

It is pleasant to record that I was carried along on my lecture tour, sometimes by invitation of a Dartmouth man, again by college girls who had graduated at Smith College; then at Peoria, Illinois; welcomed there by a dear friend from Brooklyn, New York, wife of a business man of that city.  I knew of Peoria only as a great place for the manufacture of whisky, and for its cast-iron stoves, but found it a city, magnificently situated on a series of bold bluffs.  And when I reached my friend’s house, a class of ladies, who had been easily chatting in German, wanted to stay and ask me a few questions.  These showed deep thought, wide reading, and finely disciplined minds.  Only one reading there in the Congregational Church, where there was such a fearful lack of ventilation that I turned from my manuscript and quoted a bit from the “Apele for Are to the Sextant of the Old Brick Meetinouse by A. Gasper,” which proved effectual.

I give this impressive exhortation entire as it should be more generally known.

A APELE FOR ARE TO THE SEXTANT

         BY ARABELLA WILSON