Every night, on my way home at ten, or a quarter past, I found the larrikin grouped in considerable force at several of the street corners, and he always gave me this pleasant salutation: "Hello, Mark!" "Here's to you, old chap! "Say--Mark!--is he dead ?"--a reference to a passage in some book of mine, though I did not detect, at that time, that that was its source.

And I didn't detect it afterward in Melbourne, when I came on the stage for the first time, and the same question was dropped down upon me from the dizzy height of the gallery.

It is always difficult to answer a sudden inquiry like that, when you have come unprepared and don't know what it means.
I will remark here--if it is not an indecorum--that the welcome which an American lecturer gets from a British colonial audience is a thing which will move him to his deepest deeps, and veil his sight and break his voice.

And from Winnipeg to Africa, experience will teach him nothing; he will never learn to expect it, it will catch him as a surprise each time.

The war-cloud hanging black over England and America made no trouble for me.