The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

CHAPTER XXIX.

AFTER THE WAR- MY PLATFORM CAREER - A LECTURE
DELIVERED OVER EIGHT HUNDRED TIMES- THE COMICAL SIDE OF A LECTURER'S LIFE.
Intellectual Giants in those Days - Stern and Inspiring Times - The
People at a White Heat of Intellectual Life --My First Lecture -
The Life of a Lecturer - James Redpath's Lyceum Bureau - Brainy
to the Tips of His Fingers - Erratic but Magnetic - The Prince of
Managers - Beginning of my Platform Career - My Resolve to
Work for Women during my Life - Do " Women who miss Marriage miss Everything? " - Titles of Lectures most frequently called
for - Entertained in Private Homes -Faith in the Future of our
Country - Kindly Lovers of our Race - When a Frolic is in Order
and a Good Laugh comes in - A Bridegroom's Valise in Place of
my own - " Oh, dry up! " - Some Amusing Experiences - Oliver
Wendell Holmes' Fee of Two Dollars and a Half -" The Lecture
warn't as funny as expected " -Billed as "Live Stock."
A HOST of vital but tempestuous questions were
launched upon the country, demanding immediate
consideration. The nation was still palpitating with the
passion and agony of the fierce civil conflict. A million
of men, North and South, had gone into death, or into an
invalidism or mutilation which is worse than death. And
through them, four or five times a million women and
children had been plunged into widowhood and orphanage,
-were, grief-stricken and desolate,- to whom life could
never again be the same that it was before the war An
army of a million soldiers who had been trained to waste,
burn, destroy, ravage, and slaughter, and who had been
practicing what they had been taught for three or four
years, had been disbanded, and the men sent to their homes.
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