The Days of a Man 1877 



Quill Club in session in New York City. The ap- 

 plause, properly timed, came back with singular 

 and uncanny effect, but the words of the chairman 

 who introduced me I heard distinctly. To add a 

 bit of local California color, connection had also 

 been made with the Cliff House in San Francisco, 

 so that my audience could hear at the same time 

 both me and the surf of the Pacific. 



Priming Another remarkable invention, the first type- 

 a letter wr iter, was sent to the Smithsonian to be tested at 

 about the same time as the telephone. On it I 

 wrote to my father, imagining with enjoyment his 

 surprise at receiving a letter in print. And for a num- 

 ber of years afterward the typewriter was a curiosity 

 rather than the business necessity it has now become. 



In August of this year I set out on a second sum- 

 mer ex pl rat i n m trie South, this time with a 

 larger party. At Morristown, Tennessee, Dudley 

 and I (coming by rail from the East) were joined 

 by Brayton, Gilbert, and three other students 

 my cousin, Edward Ely of Sycamore, Illinois, John 

 H. Oliver, since a well-known surgeon of Indianapolis, 

 and Wade Ritter, afterward an attorney in Colo- 

 rado, whose son later followed me to Stanford 

 University. These five had tramped across from 

 Rock Castle River, past Cumberland Gap, to meet 

 Dudley and me. 



On the way through Virginia I sat opposite a 

 young woman who was wearing two or three medals 

 earned for "good deportment" at a woman's college 

 in Christiansburg. Soon she began to talk, asked 

 me to share her lunch, and displayed a number of 

 brass buttons cut from the uniforms of boys in the 

 C 160] 



