All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
    All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
    Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.

I knew Mr. Shaw (Josh Billings) and wished Mr. Arnold, the apostle of sweetness and light, to meet that rough diamond—­rough, but still a diamond.  Fortunately one morning Josh came to see me in the Windsor Hotel, where we were then living, and referred to our guest, expressing his admiration for him.  I replied: 

“You are going to dine with him to-night.  The ladies are going out and Arnold and myself are to dine alone; you complete the trinity.”

To this he demurred, being a modest man, but I was inexorable.  No excuse would be taken; he must come to oblige me.  He did.  I sat between them at dinner and enjoyed this meeting of extremes.  Mr. Arnold became deeply interested in Mr. Shaw’s way of putting things and liked his Western anecdotes, laughing more heartily than I had ever seen him do before.  One incident after another was told from the experience of the lecturer, for Mr. Shaw had lectured for fifteen years in every place of ten thousand inhabitants or more in the United States.

Mr. Arnold was desirous of hearing how the lecturer held his audiences.

“Well,” he said, “you mustn’t keep them laughing too long, or they will think you are laughing at them.  After giving the audience amusement you must become earnest and play the serious role.  For instance, ’There are two things in this life for which no man is ever prepared.  Who will tell me what these are?’ Finally some one cries out ‘Death.’  ‘Well, who gives me the other?’ Many respond—­wealth, happiness, strength, marriage, taxes.  At last Josh begins, solemnly:  ’None of you has given the second.  There are two things on earth for which no man is ever prepared, and them’s twins,’ and the house shakes.”  Mr. Arnold did also.

“Do you keep on inventing new stories?” was asked.

“Yes, always.  You can’t lecture year after year unless you find new stories, and sometimes these fail to crack.  I had one nut which I felt sure would crack and bring down the house, but try as I would it never did itself justice, all because I could not find the indispensable word, just one word.  I was sitting before a roaring wood fire one night up in Michigan when the word came to me which I knew would crack like a whip.  I tried it on the boys and it did.  It lasted longer than any one word I used.  I began:  ’This is a highly critical age.  People won’t believe until they fully understand.  Now there’s Jonah and the whale.  They want to know all about it, and it’s my opinion that neither Jonah nor the whale fully understood it.  And then they ask what Jonah was doing in the whale’s—­the whale’s society.’”

Mr. Shaw was walking down Broadway one day when accosted by a real Westerner, who said: 

“I think you are Josh Billings.”

“Well, sometimes I am called that.”