While I was gaining practice in the first years
of platform work, I had the good fortune to have
profitable employment as a soldier, or as a
correspondent or lawyer, or as an editor or as a
preacher, which enabled me to pay my own expenses,
and it has been seldom in the fifty years
that I have ever taken a fee for my personal use.
In the last thirty-six years I have dedicated
solemnly all the lecture income to benevolent
enterprises. If I am antiquated enough for an
autobiography, perhaps I may be aged enough to
avoid the criticism of being an egotist, when I
state that some years I delivered one lecture,
``Acres of Diamonds,'' over two hundred times
each year, at an average income of about one
hundred and fifty dollars for each lecture.
It was a remarkable good fortune which came
to me as a lecturer when Mr. James Redpath
organized the first lecture bureau ever established.
Mr. Redpath was the biographer of John Brown
of Harper's Ferry renown, and as Mr. Brown had
been long a friend of my father's I found employment,
while a student on vacation, in selling that
life of John Brown. That acquaintance with Mr.
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