122 MY LIFE 



"They care not any whit for pain or pleasure 



That Beem to men the sum and vm] of all; 

 Dumb force and barren number are their measure; 



What can be. shall be, though the threat world fall. 

 They take no heed of man or man's deserving, 



Reck not what happy lives they make or mar, 

 Work out their fatal will unswerv'd unswerving, 



And know not that they are ! " 



The poem consists of twenty-one verses, every one of them 

 perfect in rhyme and rhythm, and each carrying on the argu- 

 ment and illustration to the conclusion. This gifted writer 

 would have been a great naturalist, and perhaps also a great 

 poet, had he not been obliged to write novels and magazine 

 articles for a livelihood. 



Another interesting character was Mrs. Beecher Hooker, 

 sister to Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

 She was a fine lecturer on social, ethical, and spiritual subjects, 

 and was also a spiritualist and trance speaker, well known 

 throughout America. One evening she gave a reception, to 

 which she invited her friends to meet me. Many of the clergy 

 and a large number of the senators and congressmen, with 

 their wives and daughters, were present, and she would insist 

 on introducing me to a number of them, so that I had to shake 

 hands with fifty or sixty people. They seemed quite puzzled. 

 I heard one say to another, " I guess he's some Western man, 

 but I never heard of him." " No," said his friend, " he's an 

 Englishman, lecturing on biology and Darwin, and such 

 things." " Wal," said the first, " he hasn't much of the 

 English accent." Mrs. Hooker was very anxious that we 

 should come to live in America (she had visited us in England) 

 and form a kind of home colony, being sure that she could get 

 many advanced thinkers to join; and some years after she 

 wrote to me about it. But my work was at home. 



Many of my most interesting and most intellectual friends 

 were spiritualists. Besides Professor Coues, a man of the 

 mental calibre of Huxley with the charming personality of 

 Mivert, I saw most of General Francis Lippit, a man who was 

 a lawyer as well as a soldier, and had held many high offices 



