Into the little Friends' meeting we filed, all sitting in silence the greater part of the time, though among the professors there were several admirable occasional speak

ers.

At Haverford there were sometimes mock trials and the like, taking the place of stage plays. In these I participated with the rest, and look back upon the evenings thus spent with a great deal of pleasure; but the meetings of the quasi-secret society I joined I recollect with greater interest, for at some of these I made my first efforts at declaiming from Shakespeare such selections as Hamlet's Soliloquy, the speeches of Brutus and of Mark Antony or the quarrel scene from "Julius Cæsar" and The Seven Ages of Man.

I remember vividly my first hurt from criticism, for one of my friends took me off admirably, both in manner of delivery and in style of gesture. I have thought of this travesty upon myself hundreds of times since and have felt grateful to have been so early shown how I sounded and appeared to others.

I left Haverford College at last after much anguish in cramming for my final examinations, for I was ever something of a dullard at study, and I thanked my lucky stars that I should never again have any examinations to pass, little dreaming that before long I would find myself on the way leading to constant examinations before the greatest tribunal imaginable, namely, the great public.

That summer of 1876, when I went back to Moorestown after a little travel with young companions, seeing such native beauty as the Hudson and Niagara, I had to face the question of what to do with myself. My parents being of moderate means it was, of course, necessary that I should work for my living. As I had friends who were physicians, I thought I should like to become a doctor, and therefore visited hospitals with my acquaintances, went through dissecting rooms, and was present at clinics and operations performed upon those suffering from accidents. The experience of the hospitals was not easy, and that of the dissecting room certainly gruesome; yet before long my nostrils became accustomed to the peculiar odor of the dissecting room; but I could not stand seeing operations performed upon mangled humanity, brought into the theatre of the hospital for treatment before the students. I was carried fainting from the place on more than one occasion, to the amusement of those who had already become hardened to the work of mercy. It was therefore presently decided that I had better go into the wool business of my uncle David Scull, founded by his father many years before.

And so, at $4 a week, I was put to learning the wool trade, and spent seven years in that establishment at No. 125, Market Street, occupied with the intricacies of my business, both in the office and in the warehouse among the workmen and the bales and fleeces of wool.

One morning my uncle David called me into the office and said that he was considering going abroad and wanted my mother and me to go with him; and so early in 1878 I had the good fortune to take this trip.

Eight months in Europe to a youth of twenty-one is no light matter, and I look back upon it as being in reality the beginning of my education, for then only was I able to comprehend the value of what I had learned at school and college and be thankful that it was an education classical in character. Few young men had then been given the opportunity to leave Quaker Philadelphia and see Europe under conditions as favorable as those I enjoyed.

We landed in Liverpool and I well remember seeing in the Mersey River that gigantic steamship, the Great Eastern, which had long been used in laying ocean cables. Indeed I had the opportunity of going aboard of her before she was broken up and of seeing the tanks in which the cable had been coiled, but which were then devoted to the base uses of circus rings and of what is nowadays called Vaudeville.

Great was my delight to discover in the cloister of Chester Cathedral the gravestones of monks bearing the name of Bispham. Upon climbing into the belfry tower I found that the oldest and largest bell in the chime had been given it by one William Bispham centuries before, as evidenced by the Latin inscription running around the lip of the bell. Near the Lady Chapel of the Cathedral is also a memorial tablet set into the wall bearing the name of William Bispham, another member of the family, who was born in 1597. This was restored in 1888 by my kinsman, William Bispham of New York.

Fascinating it was to me to visit Bispham Hall, that ancient home of my people in Lancashire, a land that had been the cradle of my race. Nowhere in the world could a youth have more thrust upon his receptive mind than during an intelligent visit to England, where we saw most of the celebrated abbeys, castles, and ancient cities, many of which I was afterward to know so well through journeys taken as a professional singer during my several years' residence in England.

On our way from London and Paris to Italy, we visited Switzerland, where occurred an incident I shall never forget, which was vividly recalled to my mind by events in the late war, when our party, having arrived in the little railway station on the way to Zermatt, left the train in order to take horses which had been ordered for us and which we found waiting.

Having arranged my mother's traveling pack upon the saddle of her horse behind the station, and all being ready for our party to go up the valley, I left the animal and went into the station for my mother; but what was my surprise on returning to find a large military German calmly mounting my mother's horse furnished with a sidesaddle, by the way - and riding off upon the animal, from whose back he had taken my mother's traveling pack and thrown it upon the ground. Of course, all my protests were unavailing. The horseman paid not the slightest heed to me or to the objections of our party; but went on his way with such rejoicing as he may have had in his inward heart, followed as he was by some good Anglo-Saxon talk, which I have no doubt he understood perfectly well. The rigidity of his back as he rode off forced me to think that he was bracing himself against something which was hitting him hard.

I was afterward to come into contact with a good many such persons in the course of my professional career, and I have always found it interesting to speculate upon the reasons that cause clever men who ought to know better to do so many obviously disagreeable things. However, that is the way of some people, I suppose. Breeds of men have their manners and customs, just as breeds of dogs have theirs.

From Switzerland our little party went down among the Italian lakes, and thence through Verona to Venice and on through other ancient Italian cities to Florence, where I was afterward to live for some time, and so to Rome.

Beyond the singing of popular songs by street musicians and by gondoliers on the canals of Venice, I heard little music during my early visits to the Land of Song. I did go once to the Costanzi Theatre in Rome to hear Verdi's opera "Don Carlos," too seldom given nowadays, and for reasons I cannot make out. Verdi was identified in his younger days with the cause of Italian unity, and his very name was used as a rallying cry, its letters standing for the patriotic toast, "Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia," V-E-R-D-I! But this, and the political opinions expressed in "Don Carlos," should have no influence on the public to-day. The eminent composer was fond of this opera, issuing a second and even a third edition of it, each time with considerable changes which make it all the better as a work of art.

In Roman churches I also heard on festivals the voices of male singers who had been in the Pope's choir at St. Peter's, which had been dispersed among the other churches some time before, where they were to be heard by an admiring public, that would actually applaud wellrendered selections in the masses as if they had been given in the concert room. This seems strange to us of today, but the period of which I speak is now recognized as having been one in which the music of the Roman Church reached almost its deepest debasement. It was the time when the organist would play such pieces as the "Brindisi" from "Lucrezia Borgia" or "La donna é mobile" from "Rigoletto" at the elevation of the Host.

When in Rome, my uncle made up his mind to go to Athens, where I was greatly impressed by the Greek theatres, cut into the slopes of the Acropolis. Fortunately