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352 the best care of you throughout your stay, and endeavour to make Zadockprattsville agreeable to you. A carriage will be in attendance at the Stage-house to convey yourself and luggage to the Inn, under full escort of the Committee on Lectures, with the Chairman at their head. 'Permit me to join my private homage 'To my high official consideration for you, 'And to subscribe myself 'Very humbly your servant, '.'

III

But it was more especially the Lecture invitations coming from venerable, gray-headed metropolitan Societies, and indited by venerable, gray-headed Secretaries, which far from elating filled the youthful Pierre with the sincerest sense of humility. Lecture? lecture? such a stripling as I lecture to fifty benches, with ten gray heads on each? five hundred gray heads in all! Shall my one, poor, inexperienced brain presume to lay down the law in a lecture to five hundred life-ripened understandings? It seemed too absurd for thought. Yet the five hundred, through their spokesman, had voluntarily extended this identical invitation to him. Then how could it be otherwise, than that an incipient should slide into Pierre, when he considered all the disgraceful inferences to be derived from such a fact. He called to mind, how that once upon a time, during a visit of his to the city, the police were called out to quell a portentous riot, occasioned by the vast press and contention for seats at the first lecture of an illustrious lad of nineteen, the author of 'A Week at Coney Island.'

It is needless to say that Pierre most conscientiously and respectfully declined all polite overtures of this sort.