I met him first at East Hampton, Long Island, in the summer of 1896, when I was visiting friends.  The other day, while in reminiscent struggle with my scrapbook, I was visited by an old friend of Dr. Talmage, who recalled the following incident: 

“It was Dr. Talmage’s custom,” he said, “to take long drives out into the country round about Washington.  Sometimes he sent for me to drive with him.  One afternoon I received a specially urgent call to be sure and drive with him that day, because he had something of great importance to discuss with me.  On our way back, towards evening, I asked him what it was.  He said, ’I work hard, very hard.  Sometimes I come back to my home tired, very tired—­lonely.  I open my door and the house is dark, silent.  The young folks are out somewhere and there is no one to talk to.’  Then he became silent himself.  I said to him:  ’Have you any one in mind whom you would like to talk to?’ ‘I have,’ he said positively.  ‘If so,’ I said, ‘go to her at once and tell her so.’  ’I will,’ he replied briskly—­and the next night he went to Pittsburg.”

We were married in January, 1898.

The first reception given in our home on Massachusetts Avenue was in the nature of a greeting between the Doctor’s friends and myself.  His own interest in the social side of things in Washington was an agreeable interruption rather than a part of his own activities.  His friends were men and women from every highway and byway of the world.  My father, a man of unusual intellectual breadth and heart, had been my companion of many years, so that I was, to some degree, accustomed to mature conceptions of people and affairs.  But the busy whirl in the life of a celebrity was entirely new.

It was soon quite evident that Dr. Talmage relied upon me for the discretionary duties of a man besieged by all sorts of demands.  From the first I feared that Dr. Talmage was over-taxing his strength, undiminished though it was at a time when most men begin to relinquish their burdens.  Therefore, I entered eagerly into my new duties of relieving the strain he himself did not realise.

His was a full and ample life devoted to the gospel of cheerfulness; and to me, I think, was given the best part of it—­the autumn.  When I knew him he had already impressed the wide world of his hearers with his striking originality of thought and style.  He had already established a form of preaching that was known by his name—­Talmagic.  Its character was the man himself, broad, brilliant, picturesque, keen with divine and human facts, told simply, always with an uplift of spiritual beauty.