GIFT OF 
 
ROBERT J^BURDETTE 
 
 His MESSAGE 
 
 EDITED FROM HIS WRITINGS 
 BY HIS WIFE 
 
 CLARA B. BURDETTE 
 
 THE CLARA VISTA PRESS 
 
 PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 
 
 THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY 
 CHICAGO PHILADELPHIA TORONTO 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
 CLARA B. BURDETTE 
 
 PRINTED IN TJ. ft. A. 
 
?S|2fiS 
 
 2s 45 
 
 fnz 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 This biography was undertaken at the request of 
 many friends of Mr. Burdette, and because I believe 
 what James Whitcomb Riley wrote to me: "Robert, 
 your husband and my friend, a man with a divine gift, 
 deserves this presentation of a lasting memorial, which 
 he so courageously built up by his own life." 
 
 To present truly a character dowered with a genius 
 so out of the ordinary that the Creator never bestowed 
 upon another an identical gift, I am persuaded that the 
 only way is to collate the expressions he himself gave 
 to it. Therefore, I have endeavored to set forth the 
 life of my late husband, Robert J. Burdette, by these 
 excerpts from his writings. 
 
 If this book shall recall to friends beautiful mem 
 ories, loving counsel and joyous hours spent with a 
 personality so winning, I shall be glad. If it shall 
 carry to others a message of inspiration, of courage, 
 of the gospel of cheer, of love and human understanding, 
 his chief desire will have been fulfilled and my labor 
 repaid. 
 
 CLARA B. BURDETTE. 
 
 50 I 4- SO 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 11 
 
 II. ARMY EXPERIENCE 35 
 
 III. FINDING HIMSELF 74 
 
 IV. NEWSPAPER CAREER 96 
 
 V. LECTURE PLATFORM 121 
 
 VI. FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 163 
 
 VII. BREAKING TIES 187 
 
 VIII. ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 202 
 
 IX. CASUAL INCIDENTS 222 
 
 X. CALIFORNIA AND PERMANENT CHURCH 
 
 WORK 241 
 
 XI. VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 295 
 
 XII. THE CLOSING YEARS 338 
 
 XIII. SOME INTIMATE PHASES 402 
 
 XIV. A LAST TRIBUTE. . 452 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 11 
 
 II. ARMY EXPERIENCE 35 
 
 III. FINDING HIMSELF 74 
 
 IV. NEWSPAPER CAREER 96 
 
 V. LECTURE PLATFORM 121 
 
 VI. FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 163 
 
 VII. BREAKING TIES 187 
 
 VIII. ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 202 
 
 IX. CASUAL INCIDENTS 222 
 
 X. CALIFORNIA AND PERMANENT CHURCH 
 
 WORK 241 
 
 XI. VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 295 
 
 XII. THE CLOSING YEARS 338 
 
 XIII. SOME INTIMATE PHASES 402 
 
 XIV. A LAST TRIBUTE.. .452 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE Frontispiece 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE HOUSE IN WHICH ROBERT J. BURDETTE WAS BORN AT GREENS 
 BORO, PA 10 
 
 FREDERICK EDWIN BURDETTE, FATHER OF ROBERT J. BURDETTE .... 12 
 MRS. SOPHIA EBERHART BURDETTE, ROBERT J. BURDETTE S MOTHER 14 
 
 DR. HENRY G. WESTON, WHOM MR. BURDETTE TITLED " GENTLEST 
 OF ALL PROPHETS" 33 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE AS A SOLDIER 36 
 
 MR. BURDETTE IN 1877 AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS LECTURE CAREER. 124 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE OF THE "ROAMING ROBERT" LETTERS 144 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE IN BRYN MAWR DAYS 202 
 
 "ROBIN S NEST," BRYN MAWR 214 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE, AS PREACHER AND PASTOR 244 
 
 THE BURDETTE PARTY IN THE HOLY LAND 248 
 
 THE AUDITORIUM, Los ANGELES, HOME OF TEMPLE BAPTIST CHURCH. 268 
 
 "SUNNYCREST," THE HOME OF DR. AND MRS. BURDETTE AT PASADENA, 
 CALIFORNIA 272 
 
 MR. BURDETTE IN HIS DEN AT "SUNNYCREST", PASADENA 338 
 
 MR. BURDETTE IN HIS GARDEN AT "SUNNYCREST" 340 
 
 MR. BURDETTE AND A GROUP OF THE FRIENDS HE MADE IN HONOLULU, 
 HAWAII 354 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE WITH MR. KENNEDY OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 
 AND MR. K. ITO, PROPRIETOR OF THE MANCHURIAN DAILY NEWS 
 AT DAIREN 356 
 
 "PAPA" BURDETTE AND CLARA 367 
 
 MR. BURDETTE IN HIS "SUNNYCREST" STUDY, TAKEN SHORTLY BEFORE 
 HIS DEATH 399 
 
 MRS. ROBERT J. BURDETTE "VIOLET" 416 
 
 THE FINAL WORD . 458 
 
THE HOUSE IN WHICH ROBERT J. BURDETTE WAS BORN 
 AT GREENSBORO, PENNSYLVANIA 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 WHERE the Monongahela runs itself out of 
 breath to catch up with the Ohio River, 
 in the little County of Greene, Pennsyl 
 vania, "a county just large enough for a 
 man to get born in", Robert Jones Burdette 
 first sighted the "new shores" on July 30, 1844. 
 Greensboro, the town which in later years was to 
 be dowered by the fame and tender memories which 
 clustered around this world-loved son, shared some of 
 the history which Greene County at large furnished for 
 early Pennsylvania, and the history makers included 
 the ancestry of this remarkable man who was to 
 become not only the apostle of the Merry Heart, but 
 the preacher of the gospel of eternal truth. 
 
 His ancestors on his mother s side came from Wales, 
 and settled in 1770 at Newark, Delaware, near the old 
 Welsh Tract Church on the railroad between Washing 
 ton and Philadelphia. His grandfather, Robert Jones, 
 was born in 1795, and Anna Eberhart, his grand 
 mother, in 1800. They were married at Greensboro on 
 August 27, 1818. Of this union there were born 
 twelve children, third among them being Sophia Eber 
 hart Jones, born June 21, 1823, who was herself to 
 become the mother of ten children, the second one being 
 Robert Jones Burdette. 
 
 This grandfather, Robert Jones, at the beginning of 
 the last century, was most interested in the glass works 
 in Greene County, which also held the investments of 
 several distinguished Americans, among them Albert 
 
 11 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 Greensboro Baptist Church today, the church where 
 the grandfather was Deacon Jones, is a cathedral glass 
 window, placed there in 1907 by Robert J. Burdette 
 in memory of his mother. 
 
 Once when he returned to Greensboro in the early 
 80 s to fill a lecture engagement he was introduced to 
 the audience by a verbose man, who assured the people 
 that he was well acquainted with the lecturer when he 
 was a boy, and told with glee and enthusiasm of his 
 boyish pranks. Mr. Burdette was obliged to remark, 
 
 "That man has a remarkable imagination, for I 
 left this town when I was only two years old/ 
 
 Referring again to this period, he wrote: 
 
 I never, positively never, did anything I was ashamed of 
 while I remained in my native State. I never swore; I never 
 lied; I never stole anything; I never went to a circus; I never 
 ran away from Sunday School; I didn t go out at night; I 
 didn t play billiards nor go to horse races. Good boy that I 
 was, I stayed at home and entertained the family. No man, 
 I ween, ever lived a purer life than I did while I lived in 
 Pennsylvania. 
 
 While he had no early recollections of his own, he 
 always possessed an affectionate loyalty for this town 
 of his birth because of the natural setting as related 
 by the older members of the family. And when in 
 after years, January 7, 1882, Greensboro s "favorite 
 son" could "reckon his latitude and longitude" and 
 in the course of a lecture pilgrimage found himself 
 again in Greene County, "where it poured down every 
 furlong of the twenty-one miles from Waynesburg to 
 my birth-place, and where every run was a torrent, 
 every creek was a river, and old Ten Mile was as broad 
 as the Monongahela and twice as quick", he wrote: 
 
 A man does love to go back and view the scenes among 
 which he made his start, even though he may not remember 
 
 13 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 Monongahela singing at my feet, and in the stars I see the soft 
 light of my mother s eyes, and listening to the song of the river, 
 I know where her dear voice caught the low, mellow music 
 that in the long ago lulled with the old-time cradle songs, her 
 little ones to sleep. 
 
 From his mother, the son Robert inherited many of 
 the Welsh characteristics which so markedly enriched 
 his life. Possibly it was from this ancestry that he 
 gained the almost singing eloquence in which his words 
 were uttered, as though in obedience to the rhythm of a 
 song, and so rapidly sometimes that the closest atten 
 tion was necessary in order to follow him. 
 
 From father, as well as mother, came the gift of a 
 brilliant mind and marvelous memory, which, in the 
 long years of literary output, was to prove a store 
 house of unfailing mental equipment. The Southern 
 gift of oratory was also his as a legacy, for his father 
 could, with argument and witty repartee, instruct and 
 entertain by the hour on any religious or political 
 subject. His parents were thoughtful people who 
 looked with earnestness upon life, and were intelligently 
 alive to the public affairs of the times. After sight and 
 hearing were almost gone, his father was keenly alive to 
 the current events of the day, and his letters which 
 were written regularly up to the time he became bed 
 ridden and it was impossible for him longer to write 
 in almost every instance abounded in political opinions 
 and references. He was an uncompromising Republi 
 can; and the Democrats, he says in one of his letters, 
 "are toiling in their State Convention today to unite as 
 many factions of thieves as they can in order to carry 
 the next State election." 
 
 In religion he was a Baptist, equally as earnest in 
 his denominational belief as in his politics. He was 
 
 15 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 a bookkeeper by profession, though engaged in limited 
 commercial enterprises from time to time. He managed 
 to maintain his family of ten, two of the children hav 
 ing died in early life, with the thrifty help of wife and 
 children, for the family income was limited, and 
 "it became necessary," as the son Robert said after 
 wards, "for me, as the oldest boy, to contribute some 
 thing at the earliest possible date to the assistance of 
 my father and mother." 
 
 The father had somewhat the easy-going way of his 
 Virginia forebears, and when he arrived at middle 
 life, his health being somewhat broken, he resigned the 
 responsibility of income producing, saying he had 
 brought up his family, and now it was their turn, and 
 they lovingly cared for him until he passed away in 
 1910. 
 
 From both sides of his ancestry Robert inherited a 
 deep and abiding religious faith. It was that religion, 
 which, untrammeled and unalloyed by doubt or fear, 
 gave him his supreme confidence in God and His 
 guardianship. 
 
 To the Pennsylvania Society of Southern California, 
 at one of its annual meetings, referring to his successive 
 pilgrimages in the development of his life and work, he 
 said: 
 
 I was born in Pennsylvania, weaned in Ohio, kidnapped by 
 Illinois, adopted by Iowa and married to California. 
 
 And so it was that his parents removed from Greens 
 boro to Ohio in 1846, where his father established a 
 small business in Cummingsville, near Cincinnati, but 
 an Ohio flood made it impossible for his customers to 
 meet their bills and he in turn was obliged to suspend 
 business. 
 16 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 Mr. Burdette revisited this spot in after years and 
 exclaimed: 
 
 Here is Cummingsville. I wonder where is Knowlton s 
 Grocery it was Knowlton s, wasn t it? Twenty-five years 
 ago I went to school in the upper story of the old stone grocery, 
 and played in the horse trough, and fell in sundry times, to 
 the infinite amusement of an enthusiastic audience and the 
 demoralization of my clothes. The long, dark, covered 
 bridge over Mill Creek that I used to people with unheard-of 
 terrors when I went streaking through it when the deepening 
 twilight filled it with grotesque shadows and gloomy shapes 
 that lurked among the heavy timbers and ponderous arches. 
 
 The canal packets that used to carry us to Cincinnati; ah! 
 you talk about floating palaces on the Mississippi! you rave 
 about the Sound steamers or the boats of the "People s Line!" 
 Did you ever ride on a passenger boat on the Miami Canal? 
 There was grandeur for you. If I could only have changed 
 places in those days with the boy who rode the hind mule, my 
 restless ambition would have been satisfied! 
 
 You never rode on a canal boat in the spring, the first one 
 that went through, to break the ice, did you? Then you have 
 never been anywhere and never done anything. But this 
 Cummingsville, as I look at it pshaw, somebody has spoiled 
 it. They have built houses all over it and a new railroad into 
 it. The canal isn t half as wide as it used to be, Mill Creek 
 seems to have been drained off somewhere; I would not live 
 in Cummingsville now for a salary. They ve spoiled it, every 
 thing is smaller except the houses. Look for the "house of 
 refuge" which was my boyish terror, and I wonder where is 
 Shaddinger s distillery that used to be the landmark on the 
 other side of the creek, and I look at the great bearded fellows 
 in the streets and about the depot and wonder if they are the 
 boys I used to go to school with? If they are, it seems to me 
 they have also changed somewhat. 
 
 It was in Cincinnati that Robert first experienced 
 the school days, the memories of which he referred to in 
 after years, when returning there to lecture, and wrote: 
 
 17 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 After the lecture I shook hands with Father Dinkelman. 
 Ah me, and he had been wondering all week if maybe I might 
 not be his Robert after all, the urchin of five or seven summers 
 who tried the patience and good nature of his heart years and 
 years ago, when I wore bare feet because they fit me so com 
 fortably. Father Dinkelman taught school in Fulton. The 
 school house stood up like a great educational elephant on long 
 legs of brick columns, and we climbed up to the school room by 
 an outside stairway. I can remember exactly how it looked. 
 You would think it could walk away on those long legs if it 
 tried. Well, that was the first school I ever went to. There I 
 got the first flogging I ever enjoyed, and I remember well what 
 it was for. Winter ruled the inverted year, bare feet had gone 
 out of fashion, and a red-hot stove glowed in the center room. 
 I was the happy owner of a goose quill, quite new and about a 
 foot long. I rubbed this feather slowly up and down the scarlet 
 stove to see it curl up. It curled up beautifully. But it couldn t 
 curl up quietly, without making a fuss about it, and if the top 
 of the stove had blown off it couldn t have created the indigna 
 tion and excitement in the school room that my little experi 
 ment with the feather did. So I was whipped. It wasn t much 
 of a whipping, I remember, because it was a very kind hand 
 that laid it on. But it scared me. 
 
 Other teachers, in old Fulton, Cummingsville and Peoria 
 have since then wrestled with my native ignorance and aversion 
 to text books, with sticks and patience and slate frames and 
 skate straps and willow switches and one thing and another, 
 but I have never forgotten the old market place school in 
 Fulton and Mr. Dinkelman. 
 
 The family was lured from Cummingsville to Peoria 
 in October, 1852, where the father was offered a position 
 as bookkeeper in the large dry-goods store of a brother- 
 in-law and here they remained until the family was 
 educated and scattered, as the years bring about the 
 natural separation of any large and active family. 
 
 But the family ties always remained strong and 
 tender as between children and parents, and among the 
 children themselves. This was evidenced during the 
 18 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 periods of absence from home in early and later life, 
 which were marked by long letters, descriptive, ex 
 planatory, telling in simple terms of family movements 
 and interests, and setting forth hopes, prospects and 
 aspirations. Here in Peoria were spent most of the 
 formative years of his young manhood. Many are the 
 pictures he himself has given in later years of his boy 
 hood experiences: 
 
 The first winter we lived in Illinois [he said], we had a 
 Christmas according to the books. My brother and I had new 
 sleds. Not store sleds, gaudily decorated with stenciled trot 
 ting horses and a name that no self-respecting boy would give 
 to a stone-drag, let alone a sled, but real hand sleds, made by 
 a regularly ordained carpenter. They were not so good as 
 they would have been had we made them ourselves, of course, 
 but they were far and away better than store sleds. They 
 were ready for the snow about the last week in November. 
 
 Early in December the snow came down. And stayed 
 down. And kept on coming down. It drifted up to the win 
 dows and over the fences. The country roads were turned into 
 embankments. When the first flakes came fluttering down, 
 a double case of whooping-cough trundled itself into our house 
 and took two boys by their respective necks and kept them on 
 the warpath until the springtime brought its healing sunshine 
 and malarial mud. Then it resigned and gave place to "fever 
 n ager." But all that winter was made of gala days to boys 
 who could get out. Every hill was a toboggan chute, and 
 every bob-sled or sleigh that drove past our windows dragged 
 after it a long trail of juvenile humanity that had "hooked on." 
 
 Think of two boys entertaining the whooping-cough and 
 gazing through the windows at that panorama of boyish joy 
 week after week, and then talk about the martyrs! And the 
 worst of it was, there was no need of our remaining in quaran 
 tine. But we hadn t lived out West long enough to know that. 
 The next winter my youngest brother had it. He went to 
 school with it, coasted with it, and one night, while skating, 
 broke through the ice with it. It did him good. He was all 
 through with it by the end of January. We were a tough 
 
 19 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 people out West in those days, and a boy who couldn t help 
 build a snow fort or go a-skating when he had the croup, was 
 considered effeminate. 
 
 Hanging up our stockings when I was a boy was not the 
 hollow farce which it now is. There were fireplaces by which 
 stockings could be hung up. To hang a collection of stockings 
 of assorted sizes around a black and cheerless register, smelling 
 of sulphur from a defective heater, is a profanation. And 
 hanging them in front of a cold and clammy steam radiator 
 should be prohibited by law. It tends to make children skep 
 tical and atheistic. 
 
 In the older days Kris Kringle had a broad chimney to 
 come down, and a fireplace as big as a store box to jump out of. 
 There was a mantelpiece like unto a sideboard, from which the 
 stockings depended. Sometimes, if a long stocking were 
 hung in the middle, insecurely held by a pin, the draft would 
 draw it partly into the fireplace during the night. Then the 
 whole family would be aroused, and we would go shuffling about 
 the house, like so many shivering phantoms, hunting for the fire. 
 
 The old-fashioned fireplace had more drawbacks than the 
 backlog. As a rule, the bigger the fireplace the colder the room. 
 All the heat that could be drawn from every room in the house 
 went up the big sitting room chimney. Eternal summer must 
 have lingered somewhere up in that great stack. 
 
 Referring to his experience on trying to cross the 
 Hinman pond on stilts: 
 
 Slowly I swayed from side to side, as I tried first one foot 
 and then the other. A silence, deep as the grave, awful, impres 
 sive, succeeded the clamorous shouting. The starboard stilt, 
 with one long sickening swing, eased slowly away from its 
 fellow. I heard a girl scream long and loud and shrill. The 
 wind hissed in my face; an inhuman yell of high-keyed boyish 
 voices surged up the very firmament; a mighty splash; the 
 roar of many waters in my ears, a blinding flash, then dark 
 ness. The next instant I lifted my head, shook the spray in a 
 cloud from my dripping locks, blew a pailful of water out of 
 my mouth, and struck out for land. Dripping like Horatius 
 after his justly celebrated passage of the Tiber, wetter than 
 
 20 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 Leander crawling out of the Hellespont, I waded ashore. And 
 round me pressed the fellows, yelling, shrieking, dancing 
 
 They threw their caps 
 
 As they would hang them on the horns o the moon, 
 
 Shouting their emulation. 
 
 They fell down and rolled in uncontrollable delight. I laid 
 violent hands on the nearest one, smote him twice and thrice, 
 dragged him, still shrieking, into the pond and ducked him. 
 He did not mind it. He laughed an unearthly, strangled laugh, 
 with his head under water. The rest of them fled from me 
 when I threatened them, for my "mad" was up to 120 degrees 
 in the shade, but this only lent increase to their frantic ebulli 
 tions of joy. My furious temper robbed the whole thing of 
 what little touch of the semi-tragic or pathetic it might have 
 possessed, and made the whole catastrophe all the funnier. 
 
 One little girl, tears in her sweet blue eyes, and her soft 
 voice all a tremble, came close to me and pitied me, and said 
 she was "so sorry." Two of her girls are married, and her 
 youngest boy is in college. They will never know how near 
 their mother came to being thrown half way across " Hinman s 
 pond" in June, 1857. 
 
 I was escorted home by a volunteer bodyguard of boys of 
 assorted sizes and all ages, who were hoarse as croup for tw 
 weeks after. 
 
 My mother rushed out of the house to meet us. 
 
 "My son!" she cried, "you have been in the pond!" 
 
 I did not know how she surmised it. Certainly nobody 
 had told her. I now attribute it to the unerring intuition of 
 maternal instinct. 
 
 "Mother," I said bitterly, "I cannot tell a lie about a 
 little thing like that. But," I added, "I saved a boy s life." 
 
 "My noble boy!" she exclaimed, "how did you do that?" 
 
 "Because," I said, in a cold, hard voice, "he got away 
 from me; that s how!" 
 
 And another incident held in memory by a girl 
 playmate who may have cried when it happened, but 
 laughs now over the boyish characteristic, she relates 
 concerning her grandfather s farm, which adjoined his 
 
 21 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 grandfather Jones farm, which was at that time about 
 a mile and a half out of Peoria, and later became the 
 bluff along the main street of the town: 
 
 Here Bob always spent Saturdays. On the hillside between 
 the two farms was a patch of very fine blackberries. I would 
 sometimes go on Friday to gather them, but finding them not 
 fully ripe, would decide to leave them for another day. At 
 about half-past four on Friday afternoon I would see a barefoot 
 boy with up-turned pantaloons and his merry whistled tune 
 trudging by, and would say, "There goes Bob Burdette, and 
 he will not leave a blackberry for me." And sure enough, on 
 Saturday afternoon there was not one to be found. We knew 
 too, that he frequented our melon patch, as he admitted many 
 years after, in a written article for one of the Peoria papers, 
 in which he said, "There never were any finer melons grown 
 than those in father Snebly s truck patch." 
 
 Years afterward he wrote from this same farm at 
 Mt. Pleasant of his grandfather: 
 
 Softly blow the winds that whisper through the grasses 
 bending over the dear old heart, scarcely more gentle in sleep 
 than in life. 
 
 His sister Anna releases from her memory this 
 picture of his boyhood: 
 
 To me he was a big teasing boy, always merry, playing 
 practical jokes, telling wonderful tales which enchanted us all, 
 of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. He 
 learned with remarkable facility, and retained what he learned 
 fully as remarkably, but perhaps for that very reason too close 
 application was irksome. He was skillful with tools, for in 
 those days boys and girls made their own games and toys. 
 We made our own checker and chess boards and men, fashioned 
 sleds and small wagons, in short, everything we used for amuse 
 ment we must provide, and in these things he was first and fore 
 most. He had always a cool and retentive mind, a nimble 
 tongue and ready wit, a cheery whistle and capable hands, was 
 beloved at home and abroad and was always what you might 
 22 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 call a popular boy. But the most vivid of my memories was 
 the whistle he and the whistle were inseparable. 
 
 Of his fondness for the outdoors, Mr. Burdette says: 
 
 From my earliest recollection of myself, I was a "woodsy" 
 boy. I worshipped the woods before I knew what tree worship 
 was. The wind calling in the tree tops would lure me away 
 from that arch-enchanter of boyhood, the circus. I grew up 
 with this love for the woods. I am said to be the most helpless 
 man in a city that ever lost himself in a maze of familiar streets. 
 But I can lose you all in the woods. My idly-busy "flutter 
 wheels" pattered on every brook in my township, and I could 
 find my rabbit traps at night. . . . 
 
 I recall a great swamp maple that every year was the first 
 herald to announce the silent on-coming of the radiant hosts 
 of autumn. First of all the tree used to fling out its banners 
 of green and gold and glorious crimson, a flaming signal for all 
 the woods to burst into the flaming splendors of autumn, veiled 
 by the misty tenderness of the Indian summer. And all the 
 year, in the protecting shadow of the trees, such a wealth of 
 woodland bloom down in the quiet hiding places of the woods 
 where only God and the squirrels and children ever find them 
 and see them and love them in their native haunts. 
 
 A procession of flowers from the time the first anemones lift 
 their pearly heads, leading the pageant of white blood root and 
 purple violets and all the summer glowed through the beauties 
 of the changing year of bud and blossom, until the St. John s 
 wort embroidered all the country roads; the purple aster and 
 goldenrod rung down the "slow curtain" while maple and 
 woodbine burned red fire for the closing transformation scene 
 of the year. 
 
 Also his brother Charlie s reminiscences of the very 
 early days are told when he writes: 
 
 My attitude toward Rob as a child was always one of 
 admiration rather than amusement. He was to me a great 
 man rather than a funny fellow. It seemed to me he knew 
 everything and could do everything. He made a set of chess 
 men when I was six or seven years old, and I remember my 
 
 23 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 wonder that he knew just what wood to get, and could cut 
 them into the exact shape of those in the stores. Also I mar 
 veled at his ability to make an elaborate old-fashioned aspara 
 gus bed. I wondered at his story-telling ability. I never 
 remembered the stories themselves especially, but I would help 
 John gather old nails and scraps of metal to buy his stories, 
 and would gladly pay double for one that he just made up as 
 he went along, but the stories themselves were lost in the 
 story teller. 
 
 Glimpses of his boyhood life are also given in a 
 letter written in the later years by his brother, John W. 
 Burdette, with whom he was associated on the Burling 
 ton Hawk-Eye, and who was until his death a lawyer 
 in Chicago: 
 
 Yesterday two bare-footed boys snared gophers in Voris 
 field, and trudged joyfully through the woods to Kickapoo 
 Creek, gathering violets and bluebells and columbines along 
 Dry Run, and the day before in a leaky boat they explored 
 the Eastern shore of Peoria Lake and the sinuosities of Farm 
 Creek, unconscious that an anxious parent the while scanned 
 their manoeuvres with a field glass. Again they over-ran 
 grandfather s farm and burned stumps, dropped com, turned 
 the grindstone, hunted eggs, swung on the grapevine, and helped 
 pull old Phoebe out of the clay hole. Sunday morning they 
 rode into town on the farm wagon in time to be marshalled, 
 not without protest, into a pew, and to fidget while Dr. Weston 
 preached. They knew every walnut, persimmon and pecan 
 tree in two counties, and never missed a poison ivy in either. 
 
 These same boyhood days, with their plays and 
 diversions, furnished him a vivid memory from which 
 he gained many an inspiration and illustration for the 
 humor of his Hawk-Eye days and the more serious 
 messages of his later life. 
 
 So long as I can remember I was a happy child, and 
 people who remember a great deal more about me than I can 
 recall, say I was a remarkably happy, good-natured baby. I 
 
 24 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 have heard my own dear mother testify to this effect. I always 
 liked the world and it has always been good to me. From boy 
 hood I have been a pet of Providence. All my life I have had 
 everything I wanted. When I could not get a desired object, 
 I said I did not want it. 
 
 And this philosophy stood him in good stead through 
 many an hour of exacting labor, trying circumstance, and 
 disappointments that would have overshadowed a less 
 optimistic nature. 
 
 Mr. Burdette s boyhood days were not all spent in 
 roaming the fields and "riding the water ways" in and 
 around Peoria, and making friends with every tree, and 
 bird, and breeze, and star, and moonbeam which 
 glorified nature in the home land, but school and some 
 work laid their restraining hand on the buoyant young 
 nature with an over-quick temper and a surplus of 
 impatience, which life s discipline finally molded into 
 the gentlest and most patient of spirits. 
 
 The close companionship with natural beauty at a 
 time when the mind was open and free for impressions, 
 was to furnish a storehouse of memories from which the 
 later imagination was to draw for color and illustration 
 of that infinite variety of word pictures which were the 
 joy and marvel of his audiences, and the school lessons 
 absorbed by snatches were to be the basis of a knowl 
 edge augmented by constant reading of history and 
 literature, especially the Bible and Shakespeare, which 
 was to furnish a use of English that never seemed to 
 want for a word more. 
 
 The fact that he learned too quickly, and played 
 truant weeks at a time, though the family did not know 
 it until Mary had to spend the summer coaching him 
 for the fall term, may have seemed most reprehensible 
 at the time; but the many excursions taken at such 
 
 25 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 times into field and woods were like the dropping of seed 
 into the fertile soil of his young mind, to blossom in 
 color and beauty when in later years he wrote of the 
 country about Peoria as a 
 
 beautiful, rumpled, rolling carpet of grass-green velvet, riddled 
 with gopher holes, and flecked with grazing cattle and white 
 clover, musical with plover, meadow larks and wild bees. 
 
 And again: 
 
 of the dust of the long cool road that went lingering in the shade 
 of the rocks and trees on its way down to the "crick." On 
 either side the great walls of Kickapoo sandstone rose high 
 above the road. Famous stone for building purposes was this 
 in the olden times. It had only one fault. It would crack, 
 peel off and crumble when it got wet, but if you kept it dry, it 
 would only crumble, peel off and crack. Plumy ferns waved 
 in the rocks, and the bells of the columbine swinging in the 
 wind fairly tinkled as we passed. Branching oaks shook hands 
 across the road. Broad-leafed hickories rustled back our 
 shouts, and down in the valley ghostly cottonwoods and slender- 
 fingered willows waved a welcome to us. 
 
 After these varied "in and out" school days he 
 entered the Hinman school, and though he afterward 
 gave many a mirthful picture of Peoria school days, 
 one was eventually to make Hinman School remem 
 bered by many who were never its pupils. The "strike 
 at Hinman s," partially fanciful, partially, perhaps, 
 based upon fact, has been read and re-read by thou 
 sands of Illinoisians, as well as others: 
 
 Away back in the fifties, "Hinman s" was not only the 
 best school in Peoria, but it was the greatest school in the world. 
 I sincerely thought so then, and as I was a very lively part of it, 
 I should know. Mr. Hinman was the faculty, and he was 
 sufficiently numerous to demonstrate the cube root with one 
 hand and maintain discipline with the other. Dear old man! 
 Boys and girls with grandchildren love him today, and think 
 
 26 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 of him among their blessings. He was superintendent of public 
 instruction, board of education, school trustee, county super 
 intendent, principal of the high school and janitor. He had a 
 pleasant smile, a genius for mathematics and a West Point 
 idea of forbearance and discipline. He carried upon his per 
 son a grip that would make the imported malady which mocks 
 that name in these degenerate days, call itself slack, in very 
 terror at having assumed the wrong title. 
 
 We used to have general exercises on Friday afternoons. 
 The most exciting feature of this weekly frivolity consisted of 
 a free-for-all exercise in mental arithmetic. Mr. Hinman gave 
 out lists of numbers, beginning with the easy ones and speaking 
 slowly. Each succeeding list he dictated more rapidly and with 
 ever-increasing complications of addition, subtraction, multi 
 plication and division, until at last he was giving them out 
 faster than he could talk. One by one the pupils dropped out 
 of the race with despairing faces but always at the closing 
 peremptory: "Answer?" at least a dozen hands shot into the 
 air and as many voices shouted the correct answer. We didn t 
 have many books and the curriculum of an Illinois school in 
 those days was not academic ; but two things the children could 
 do, they could spell as well as the dictionary and they could 
 handle figures. Some of the fellows fairly wallowed in them. 
 I didn t. I simply drowned. I drowned in the shallowest 
 pond of the numbers that ever spread itself on the page. And 
 even unto this day I do the same. 
 
 Well, one year the teacher introduced an innovation 
 "compositions" by the girls and "speaking" pieces by the 
 boys. It was easy enough for the girls. He had only to read 
 the beautiful thought that "spring is the pleasantest season of 
 the year". Now and then a new girl from the east, awfully 
 precise, would begin her essay, "Spring is the most pleasant 
 season of the year", and her effort would be called down with 
 derisive laughter, whereat she walked to her seat, very stiffly 
 with a proud, dry-eyed look in her face, only to lay her head 
 upon her desk when she reached it and weep silently until school 
 closed. But speaking pieces did not meet with the favor of 
 the boys, save one or two boys who were in training by their 
 parents for congressmen or presidents. 
 
 The rest of us, who were just boys, with no desire to be 
 anything else, endured the tyranny of compositions about a 
 
 27 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 month, and then resolved to abolish the whole business by a 
 general revolt. Big and little, we agreed to stand by each other, 
 break up the new exercise and get back to the old order of 
 things, the hurdle races in mental arithmetic and the geographi 
 cal chants which we could run and intone together. 
 
 Was I a mutineer? Well, say, son, your pa was a consti 
 tutional conspirator. He was in the color guard. You see, 
 the first boy called on for a declamation was to announce the 
 strike, and as my name stood very high in the alphabetical 
 roll of pupils I had an excellent chance of leading the assault 
 ing column, a distinction for which I was not at all ambitious, 
 being a stripling of tender years, ruddy countenance and sen 
 sitive feelings. However, I was stiffened to my soul, girded 
 on my armor by slipping an atlas back under my jacket, and 
 was ready for the fray, feeling a little terrified shiver of de 
 light as I thought that the first lick Mr. Hinman gave me 
 would make him think he had broken my back. 
 
 The hour of speaking pieces, an hour big with fate, arrived 
 on time. A boy named Aby Abbot was called up ahead of me, 
 but he happened to be one of the presidential aspirants (he was 
 mate on an Illinois steamboat, stern-wheeler, at that, the last 
 I knew of him) and, of course, he flunked and said his piece 
 a sadly prophetic selection "Mr. President, it is natural for 
 men to indulge in the illusions of hope." We made such sug 
 gestive and threatening gestures at him, however, when Mr. 
 Hinman was not looking, that he forgot half his "piece", broke 
 down and cried. He also cried after school, a little more 
 bitterly and with far betterreason. 
 
 Then, after an awful pause, in which the conspirators 
 could hear the beating of each other s hearts, my name was 
 called. 
 
 I sat still at my desk and said: 
 
 "I ain t going to speak no piece." 
 
 Mr. Hinman looked greatly surprised and asked : 
 
 "Why not, Robert?" 
 
 " Because there ain t going to be any more speaking pieces." 
 
 The teacher s eyes grew round and big as he inquired: 
 
 "Who says there will not?" 
 
 I said, in slightly firmer tones, as I realized that the moment 
 had come for dragging the rest of the rebels into court: 
 
 28 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 "All of us boys." 
 
 But Mr. Hinman smiled and said quietly that he guessed 
 there would be a "little more speaking before the close of the 
 season". Then, laying his hand on my shoulder with most 
 punctilious but chilling courtesy, he invited me to the rostrum. 
 The "rostrum" was twenty-five feet distant, but I arrived 
 there on schedule time and only touched my feet to the floor 
 twice on the way. 
 
 And then and there under Mr. Hinman s judicious coaching 
 before the assembled school, and with feelings, nay, emo 
 tions which I now shudder to recall, I did my first "song and 
 dance". Many times before had I stepped off a sole-cachuca 
 to the staccato pleading of a fragment of slate frame, upon 
 which my tutor was a gifted performer, but never until that 
 day did I accompany myself with words. Boy-like I had 
 chosen for my piece a poem sweetly expressive of those peace 
 ful virtues which I most heartily despised. So that my per 
 formance at the inauguration of the strike as Mr. Hinman 
 conducted the overture, ran something like this: 
 
 " Oh, not for me (whack) is the rolling (whack) drum, 
 
 Or the (whack) (whack) trumpet s wild (whack) appeal 
 
 (whack) ; 
 Or the cry (swish, whack) of (boo-hoo-hoo) war when (whack) 
 
 foe is coming (ouch) 
 
 Or the (ow-wow) brightly (whack) flashing (whack, whack) 
 steel (wah-hoo, wah-hoo)." 
 
 Thus I illustrated the seven stanzas of this beautiful poem. 
 I really had selected it to please my mother, whom I had 
 invited to be present when I supposed I would deliver it. But 
 the fact that she attended a missionary meeting at the Baptist 
 church that afternoon made me a friend of missions forever. 
 Suffice it to say, then, that my pantomime kept pace and time 
 with Mr. Hinman s system of punctuation until the last line 
 was sobbed and I went to my seat in a mist of tears and sat 
 down gingerly and sideways, only wondering why an inscrutable 
 Providence had given to the rugged rhinoceros the hide which 
 in the eternal fitness of things had plainly been prepared for 
 the schoolboy. 
 
 But I quickly forgot my own sorrow and dried my tears 
 with laughter in the enjoyment of the subsequent acts of the 
 
 29 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 opera. As the chorus developed and the plot and action, Mr. 
 Hinman, who had been somewhat gentle with me, dealt firmly 
 with the larger boy who followed, and there was a scene of 
 revelry for the next twenty minutes. The old man shook Bill 
 Morrison until his teeth rattled so you couldn t hear him cry. 
 He hit Mickey McCann, the tough boy from the lower prairie, 
 and Mickey ran out and lay down in the snow to cool off. He 
 hit Jake Bailey across the legs with a slate frame and it hurt 
 so that Jake couldn t howl he just opened his mouth wide, 
 held up his hands, gasped and forgot his own name. He 
 pushed Bill Haskell into a seat and the bench broke. 
 
 He ran across the room and reached out for Lem Harkins, 
 and Lem had a fit before the old man touched him. He shook 
 Dan Stevenson for two minutes and when he let him go Dan 
 walked around his own desk five times before he could find it 
 and then he couldn t sit down without holding on. He whipped 
 the two Knowltons with a skate strap in each hand at the same 
 time, and the Greenwood family all at once with a girl s skipping 
 rope, and they raised such a united cry and wail that the clock 
 stopped. 
 
 He took a twist in Bill Rodecker s front hair, and Bill slept 
 with his eyes open for a week. He kept the atmosphere of 
 that school room full of dust and splinters and lint, weeping, 
 wailing and gnashing of teeth until he reached the end of the 
 alphabet and all hearts ached and wearied of the inhuman 
 strife and wicked contentions. Then he stood up before us a 
 sickening tangle of slate frames, straps, ebony ferule and skip 
 ping rope, a smile on his kind face, and asked in clear triumphant 
 tones: 
 
 "Who says there isn t going to be any more speaking 
 pieces?" 
 
 And every last boy in that school sprang to his feet. Stand 
 ing there as one human being with one great mouth, we shrieked 
 in concerted anguish: 
 
 "Nobody don t!" 
 
 And your pa, my son, who led that strike, has been "speak 
 ing pieces" ever since. 
 
 On the occasion of the commemoration of the 
 fiftieth anniversary of the Peoria High School in 1906, 
 30 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 his niece, Ellen Muir, read a letter from Mr. Burdette, 
 which tells the story of his high school days there: 
 
 1861 was a class composed exclusively of "stars". There 
 was too much talent to play in one combination the house 
 wouldn t hold the people. So Robert Gregg and Sewell Ford 
 were graduated in the spring, and at Christmas Mary Luccock, 
 John Chalmers and I stepped over the threshold. I stood at 
 the foot of the class, but by persuasion mingled with guile, 
 I induced my colleagues to adopt for our class motto, " Ex pede 
 Hereulem", and once more I sat in the red cart close to the 
 driver, with the unplugged melons sowed behind us in appe 
 tizing rows, up to the load line. My "commencement essay" 
 foreshadowed my subsequent career as a statesman. It was 
 "The Press and the Ballot Box". I have preserved that 
 rather remarkable state paper. Would you like to see it? 
 For a hundred thousand dollars you may. I sometimes read 
 it myself. It mitigates the horror of approaching death. 
 Nothing, my children, is ever written in vain, except a protest 
 against the unfair assessment of taxes on your own property. 
 
 When the duplex class of 61 went out, I ceased to be an 
 actor, factor or malefactor in the drama of the Peoria High 
 School. My school days were ended, but my education had 
 just begun. Because there has never been any school since 
 that day to divide my affection and loyalty, my love for the 
 old school has been constant, deepening in its loyalty and ten 
 derness as the years multiply between today and the yester 
 days at school. The days and the boys and the girls that were 
 and are "dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart". 
 
 I send my greeting to the school of yesterday and today 
 I send to the graduates the love of an Old Boy. To think that 
 more than forty years ago I knew nearly as much as the young 
 est and most omniscient of you. Come up into the bigger and 
 higher school where the desks are more comfortable, the lessons 
 are harder, the hours longer, the teachers more pitilessly exact 
 ing, where the study is more of a joy and the rewards are higher 
 and more justly bestowed. 
 
 Come right up into the cart and sit beside your Uncle 
 Robert. Then, whenever you re hungry, you may cut a nice, 
 ripe, juicy melon. The cart s full of em. 
 
 31 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Er just before I close. About the melons. Don t want 
 to mislead you. There are plenty of melons. In fact, the 
 whole world is one big melon patch. And it is true that some 
 carts are empty and some are full of melons. But, one little 
 pointer, my children. You ve got to pick your own melons 
 and load em into the cart yourself. Then you re sure they 
 are there. God bless every boy and girl of you. 
 
 In a newspaper letter touching revived memories of 
 all his school days, he says: 
 
 I was a maverick when I started to school, but successive 
 dynasties of instruction put the proper brand all over me before 
 I was finally broken to the yoke and plow. I wasn t professedly 
 a believer in corporal punishment, but I was better than most 
 professors and nominal believers I practiced the doctrine 
 right along; at least, I lived up to it; it did me good and does 
 me good unto this day. It makes a great many things beauti 
 fully clear to me. " Now no chastening for the present seemeth 
 to be joyous," says the great apostle, "but grievous." I don t 
 need any commentary on that passage. I am a seminary 
 exegete on that part of the Epistle. 
 
 But I can truly say that all my chastisements at school 
 are at this day among my most joyous memories. I laugh 
 every time I think of one. Not so much about the whipping, 
 as over the recollection of the jolly good time I had earning it. 
 I was as recklessly happy- as a man who is acquiring the gout 
 for his grandsons. 
 
 But all that went in the curriculum; my school days were 
 happy, seriously speaking. I was a happy boy; all the year 
 round I was happy. And in the loyal, tender, loving niches 
 of my heart I have builded the fairest shrines my affection can 
 fashion, wherein I have placed the images of the saints who 
 were my school teachers. Some of them are living; some are 
 dead; all are old and gray. But there, where I alone can see 
 them, they are all living; they are all young, with the morning 
 light of love and enthusiasm shining in their faces. Memory 
 makes them beautiful, and the years cluster their brows like 
 stars. 
 
 Coincident with the " barefoot days" and the school 
 days was an influence which was to act upon one of the 
 32 
 
DR. HENRY G. WESTON, WHOM MR. BURDETTE TITLED "GENTLEST OF ALL 
 
 PROPHETS" 
 
ANCESTRY AND BOYHOOD 
 
 strongest forces of Robert s nature. Henry G. Westcn, 
 pastor of the Baptist Church, and friend of the Burdette 
 family was the preacher from whom Robert was to 
 gain his most serious impression of life and work. Mr. 
 Burdette s admiration for him was great, and his love 
 tender through all the years, and he gives us some 
 characteristic reminiscences in a sketch written many 
 years later, 1902, when he himself was a preacher of the 
 Gospel and Dr. Weston was entering the afternoon 
 time of his life: 
 
 Tall, erect as a soldier, strong as an athlete; a perfectly 
 healthy man with no record of triumphant prowess in golf, 
 tennis or football; never much of a fisherman, nothing at all 
 of a hunter I know he never fired a gun in his life, and I do 
 not think he ever had one in his hand; never at all given to 
 "that tired feeling", nor addicted to long vacations; a hale 
 man at eighty-two, doing his daily work, preaching and teach 
 ing; making long railway journeys to meet his engagements; 
 eating his bread with his own teeth; all his life a preacher, 
 never anything else than a preacher and a teacher of preachers 
 Henry G. Weston, D.D., LL.D., gentlest of the prophets! 
 Mention his name anywhere in this United States, and some 
 face in the listening circle will lighten with love in the eyes and 
 a tender smile wreathing the lips. When he makes heaven glad 
 with his coming his memory in this world will be a perfume, 
 old-fashioned and sweet as the odor of the roses at Crozer. 
 
 As life within the home was daily fired and stimu 
 lated by religious and political discussions, so education 
 from without was to be a co-mingling of these two strong 
 inspirations. During these same Peoria days, Mr. 
 Burdette was as a boy to hear his first political debates 
 from the rugged men of that western country, who 
 ofttimes sat on the rocks by the old Monroe s Mill on 
 the Kickapoo and talked of the things then agitating 
 the Union. Lincoln and Douglas were stumping the 
 State of Illinois. Fremont s name was the first 
 3 33 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Republican battle cry, and "free soil, free press, free 
 men, free speech and Fremont " rang through the land 
 like the glad prophecy it was. The names of Lincoln, 
 Douglas, Buchanan, Pierce, Scott and Seward were 
 heard often in the wayside and village arguments and 
 debates of those days. 
 
 Out of the boyish conclusions reached from the 
 hearing of those arguments was formed the determina 
 tion that led him, after the election of Lincoln and the 
 beginning of the Civil War, as a lad of eighteen, to 
 enlist with the Illinois regiment that went from Peoria. 
 
 Regarding this same period, an aunt of his, of whom 
 he was very fond, and with whom he corresponded 
 most affectionately up to the very last months of his 
 life, writes: 
 
 Just at the beginning of the Civil War, Rob wrote me that 
 he belonged to the Wide-awake Club, and that they were 
 coming down to run Brackenbridge and Bell voters into the 
 sea, sink South Carolina, etc. I was furious and wrote back 
 to him to "come on, Virginia has six feet of ground for every 
 Yankee that invades her sacred soil." Brother Fred, Rob s 
 father, wrote to my father that while he enjoyed our "brilliant" 
 correspondence, he doubted the propriety of allowing it in the 
 exciting times, so we were required to write of other things 
 than war. We continued to have our fun, however, for he 
 always had an imaginary sweetheart for each of us. 
 
 34 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 OLDER school boys had enlisted as volunteers 
 and gone to the Bar. Lincoln had issued his 
 call for volunteers for three years or for the 
 war. The question of enlistment had been 
 tearfully and prayerfully discussed at home in the dark 
 days of early 1862. Mr. Burdette s father and mother 
 were intense in their patriotism and loyalty to the North 
 and its cause, and it was agreed that he should go when 
 he had reached his eighteenth birthday. 
 
 In his "Drums of the 47th," a book of recollections 
 of incidents of his service, he says: 
 
 I was eighteen years old that thirtieth of July. I was 
 lying in the shade of a cherry tree, and at a window nearby 
 my mother was sewing. She sang as she sewed, in a sweet 
 fashion that women have singing, rocking, thinking, dream 
 ing; the swaying sewing-chair weaving all those occupations 
 together in a reverie-pattern that is half real, half vision. 
 She was singing sweet old songs that I had heard her sing ever 
 since I was a baby songs of love, and home, and peace; a 
 song of the robin, and the carrier dove, and one little French 
 song of which I was very fond, " Jeanette and Jeannot." 
 
 It was such a quiet, dreamy, peaceful July afternoon. 
 There was the sound of a gentle wind in the top of the cherry 
 tree, softly carrying an aeolian accompaniment to my mother s 
 singing. Once a robin called. A bush of " old-fashioned roses " 
 perfumed the breath of the song. A cricket chirped in the grass. 
 
 Boom! A siege-gun fired away off down in Charleston, 
 and a shell burst above Fort Sumter, wreathing an angry halo 
 about the most beautiful flag the sunshine ever kissed. From 
 ocean to ocean the land quivered as with the shock of an earth 
 quake. Far away, from the ramparts of Sumter, a bugle 
 shrilled across the states as though it were the voice of the 
 
 35 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 trumpet of the angel calling the sheeted dead to rise. And 
 close at hand the flam, flam, flam of a drum broke into the wild 
 thrill of the long roll the fierce snarls of the dogs of war, 
 awakened by that signal shot from Beauregard s batteries. 
 
 I leaped to my feet, seized my cap and ran to the window 
 to wind my arms around my mother s neck. 
 
 "Mother," I said, "I m going!" 
 
 Her beautiful face turned white. She held me close to her 
 heart a long, silent, praying time. Then she held me off and 
 kissed me a kiss so tender that it rests upon my lips today 
 and said: 
 
 "God bless my boy!" 
 
 And with my mother s blessing I hurried down to the 
 recruiting station, and soon I marched away with a column of 
 men and boys, still keeping step to the drum. 
 
 It was to be more than three years before he saw 
 again the mother who bade him a tearful good-bye, and 
 before he knew again the peace of a home and the 
 shade of the cherry tree. 
 
 All the way [he says], from Peoria to Corinth, from Corinth 
 to Vicksburg, up the Red River Country, down to Mobile and 
 Fort Blakely and back to Tupelo and Selma, the voice and the 
 song of the prayer followed me and at last led me back home. 
 
 The record of his service found among his papers 
 in his own handwriting shows that he enlisted at 
 Peoria, Illinois, on August 4, 1862, in Company "C" 
 of the 47th Illinois Infantry Regiment, and was dis 
 charged at Selma, Alabama, July 20, 1865, and below 
 that record is a note in which he says: 
 
 Detailed as orderly at Headquarters, 3rd Division, 15th 
 Army Corps, Brigadier General Asboth commanding. Re 
 mained at these headquarters (afterward 1st Division, 16th 
 Army Corps) until discharged at Selma, Alabama, at the close 
 of the war, July 20, 1865. 
 
 And upon a leaf from an old memorandum book was 
 found a list of the engagements in which he had taken 
 36 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE AS A SOLDIER 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 part, numbered from 1 to 21, beginning with Jackson, 
 Mississippi, May 14, 1863, and ending with Spanish 
 Fort, April 8, 1865. He received honorable mention 
 for bravery in the Siege of Vicksburg. 
 
 His letters written in the course of the war to the 
 various members of his family at Peoria were graphic, 
 and sent with such regularity as was possible. Fortu 
 nately they were preserved with tender care in the 
 family archives, and came into my hands after his 
 death boyish descriptions of battles and life in camp, 
 expressions of patriotic resolve, humorous accounts of 
 his experiences when there was humor to be had, wise 
 and admonitory paragraphs to his brothers and sisters, 
 and always declarations of his good health and cheer 
 fulness. Fifty years afterwards he wrote: 
 
 I went into the army a light-hearted boy, with a face as 
 smooth as a girl s and hair as brown as my beautiful mother s. 
 I fought through more than a score of battles and romped 
 through more than a hundred frolics. I had the rollicking 
 time of my life and came home stronger than an athlete, with 
 robust health builded to last the rest of my life. 
 
 He was tantalizingly short and small of stature: 
 
 When I went into the recruiting office [he wrote], two 
 lieutenants of the Forty-seventh Illinois Regiment, Samuel 
 A. L. Law of C Company and Frank Biser of B, looked at me 
 without the slightest emotion of interest. When I told them 
 what I wanted, they smiled, and Lieutenant Biser shook his 
 head. But Lieutenant Law spoke encouragingly, and pointed 
 to the standard of military height, a pine stick standing out 
 from the wall in rigid uncompromising insistence, five feet three 
 inches from the floor. As I walked toward it I could see it 
 slide up, until it seemed to lift itself seven feet above my ambi 
 tious head. If I could have kept up the stretching strain I 
 put on every longitudinal muscle in my body in that minute 
 of fate, I would have been as tall as Abraham Lincoln by the 
 close of the war. As it was, when I stepped under that Rhada- 
 
 37 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 man thine rod, I felt my scalp-lock, which was very likely 
 standing on end with apprehension, brush lightly against it. 
 The officers laughed, and one of them dictated to the sergeant- 
 clerk: 
 
 "Five feet three." 
 
 My heart beat calmly once more and I shrank back to 
 my normal five feet two and seven-eighths plus. That was 
 nearly fifty years ago, and taking all the thought I could to 
 add to my stature, I have only passed that tantalizing standard 
 an inch and a half. I received certain instructions concerning 
 my reporting at the office daily, and as I passed out I heard the 
 sergeant say: "That child will serve most of his time in the 
 hospital." 
 
 But in three years service I never saw the inside of a hos 
 pital save on such occasions as I was detailed to nurse the 
 grown men; I never lost one day off duty on account of sickness. 
 There were times when I was so dead tired, and worn out, 
 and faint with hunger that my legs wabbled as I walked, and 
 my eyes were so dry and hot with lack of sleep, that I would 
 have given a month s pay for floor space in Andersonville 
 prison. But whenever I turned my eyes longingly toward the 
 roadside, passing a good place to "drop out", I could hear that 
 big sergeant s pitying sneer, and I braced up and offered to 
 carry my file-leader s knapsack for a mile or two. 
 
 The 47th was a fighting regiment, and fought under 
 five colonels, all of whom he was accustomed to call 
 "old-fashioned" in that they rode close up to the firing 
 line. John Briner, who marched away with the 47th 
 from Peoria in 61, died in the service, being re-appointed 
 Colonel of the re-organized regiment in 1865. William 
 A. Thrush was killed at the head of his regiment at the 
 battle of Corinth, October 3, 1862. John N. Cromwell, 
 "boy Colonel", was killed at Jackson, Miss., May 
 16, 1863. John Dixon McClure was wounded nigh 
 to death in the siege of Vicksburg, June 20, 1863. 
 Daniel L. Miles, Lieutenant-Colonel, was killed in the 
 battle of Farmington, Miss. In truth, the 47th was a 
 fighting regiment. 
 38 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 It was not to be long after his enlistment before, 
 as a recruit, he had his first impresion of battle, for at 
 Corinth, he says in his recollections: 
 
 Twenty-eight thousand Confederates dashed themselves 
 against our line of defense those two savage days like waves 
 of the sea. My own regiment lay in the ditch of Battery 
 Robinette, which bore the brunt of the final attack. Curtains 
 of infantry connected the forest. For a wall of sand is as good 
 to stop the sea as a sea-wall of granite. Twenty thousand 
 boys in blue there were under Rosecrans, fresh from fighting 
 the same foes at luka, where our major, Cromwell, had been 
 taken prisoner. The fighting on the third at Corinth punished 
 the Federals severely. At half-past nine o clock on the morn 
 ing of the fourth, Price s column, formed en masse, came 
 charging along the Bolivar road like a human torrent. It 
 moved in phalanx shape through a storm of iron and lead from 
 batteries and infantry, and drove through all opposition, the 
 men bowing their faces, but pushing on, as men crowd their 
 way against a driving storm. As it came within rifle range 
 the phalanx divided into two columns covering the front of 
 the forts. It captured Fort Richardson and General Rose 
 crans headquarters, in front of which seven dead Confederates 
 were found after the battle. It seemed that nothing could 
 stop that onrush of determined men. But in the score of min 
 utes that so often decides a battle, the Fifty-sixth Illinois 
 recaptured Battery Richardson, the heavy assaulting column 
 was thrown into confusion, and the splendid charge was turned 
 into a swift retreat. The whole affair lasted half an hour. 
 
 Meanwhile Van Dorn s column, which should have co 
 operated simultaneously with that under Price, but was delayed 
 by the natural obstacles of broken ground, tangled swamps 
 and densely-wooded thickets, came charging in on the Chewalla 
 road. Texans and Mississippians these fighters were. I was 
 greatly disturbed to perceive they were headed straight for 
 our position Forts Williams and Robinette; but then I 
 thought of those fearful Parrott thirty-pounders and the ter 
 rible guns of our own Robinette trained point-blank on that 
 charging whirlwind. Colonel Rogers himself led his Texans, 
 densely formed, in a close charging line massed four deep, the 
 Mississippians keeping pace with them. 
 
 39 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 The infantrymen sprang to their feet. Volley after volley 
 of musketry helped the big guns tear the assaulting lines to 
 pieces. But they kept on. They struck the infantry supports 
 as a great combing wave strikes a reef. They beat us down 
 with their muskets and thrust us away with bayonet lunges. 
 Colonel Rogers leaped the ditch at the head of his men and 
 was killed on the slope of the parapet. We saw the soldiers 
 in gray swarming into the embrasures, fighting with the gunners 
 who met them hand-to-hand with muskets and sponge staffs. 
 The Ohio brigade of Stanley s division, firing withering volleys, 
 came to the rescue of the forts and their supports, and Con 
 federate reinforcements hurried into the maelstrom of fire 
 and steel. Our Colonel, Thrush, was killed, shot through the 
 heart. Step by step we crowded them back until they shared 
 the fate of the other column and turned in retreat. The battle 
 was over. 
 
 That night I was detailed on duty with the parties that go 
 over the field, looking for the wounded and the dead, succoring 
 the living, burying the dead. The savage day had been a 
 baptism of fire. The night was a baptism of tears. The day 
 had been the terrible inspiration of battle. The night was the 
 meditation of sorrow. On the battle-field Death was the grisly 
 King of Terrors, wearing the black plumes of a mighty con 
 queror, naked, horrible, and bloody in his brutality. 
 
 We found a dead Confederate lying on his back, his out 
 spread fingers stretched across the stock of his rifle lying at 
 his side. He was one of Rogers Texans. Fifty-seven of them 
 we had found lying in the ditch of Battery Robinette. I 
 covered his face with the slouch hat still on his head and took 
 off the haversack slung to his neck that it might not swing as 
 we carried him to his sleeping-chamber, so cool and quiet and 
 dark after the savage tumult and dust and smoke of that day 
 of horror. 
 
 "Empty, isn t it?" asked the soldier working with me. I 
 put my hand in it and drew forth a handful of roasted acorns. 
 I showed them to my comrade. "That s all," I said. 
 
 "And he s been fighting like a tiger for two days on that 
 hog s forage," he commented. We gazed at the face of the 
 dead soldier with new feelings. By and by my comrade said: 
 
 "I hate this war and the thing that caused it. I was 
 40 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 taught to hate slavery before I was taught to hate sin. I love 
 the Union as I love my mother better. I think this is the 
 wickedest war that was ever waged in the world. But this" 
 and he took some of the acorns from my hand "this is what 
 I call patriotism." 
 
 "Comrade," I said, "I m going to send these home to the 
 Peoria Transcript. I want them to tell the editor this war 
 won t be ended until there is a total failure of the acorn crop. 
 I want the folks at home to know what manner of men we are 
 fighting." 
 
 That was early in my experience as a soldier. I never 
 changed my opinion of the cause of the Confederacy. I was 
 more and more devoted to the Union as the war went on. But 
 I never questioned the sincerity of the men in the Confederate 
 ranks. I realized how dearly a man must love his own section 
 who would fight for it on parched acorns. I wished that his 
 love and patriotism had been broader, reaching from the Gulf 
 to the Lakes a love for the Union rather than for a state. 
 But I understood him. I hated his attitude toward the Union 
 as much as ever, but I admired the man. And after Corinth 
 I never could get a prisoner half-way to the rear and have any 
 thing left in my haversack. 
 
 Oh, I too have suffered the pangs of hunger for my dear 
 country, as all soldiers have done now^and then. But not as 
 that Confederate soldier did. We went hungry at times, when 
 rain and mud or the interference of the enemy detained the 
 supply trains. But that man half-starved. That s different. 
 
 After the battle of Nashville, December, 1864, we marched 
 in pursuit of Hood as far as the Tennessee River. There, for 
 more than a week, we subsisted on corn not canned corn and 
 not even popcorn, but common, yellow field corn on the cob. 
 And the row we suffering hero-martyrs made about it! 
 
 A soldier was carrying a couple of ears of corn to a camp- 
 fire to parch for his supper. A mule tethered nearby saw him 
 and lifted up its dreadful voice in piteous braying. The indig 
 nant warrior smote him in the jaw, crying, "You get nine 
 pounds a day and I get only five, you long-eared glutton, and 
 now you want half of mine!" 
 
 Referring to the courage and fear of a soldier, he 
 
 once wrote: 
 
 41 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Why, then, does the coward even start to war? 
 
 For certainly he does start, in every war that is declared. 
 He is found in every army. He goes to war voluntarily, many 
 times eagerly, for the cowardly temperament is volatile. A 
 rabbit is sprightlier than a bulldog. The coward may start 
 to war with the valor born of ignorance. 
 
 When I enlisted, I had but one well-defined fear. I was 
 afraid the war would be over before I got into a battle. Every 
 time I got hold of a newspaper or news reached the camp by 
 courier, my heart sank with the disloyal dread that that old 
 Grant all generals are "old" to the soldier had utterly 
 crushed the enemy with one terrible blow, and I would have 
 to go home without one battle story. It was terrible. How 
 ever, it didn t happen. Though many a time afterward I 
 wished it had. 
 
 I got into my battle. After that a second fear displaced 
 the first. I was afraid the war would be ended before I got 
 into another. And again my fear was an illusion. The war 
 kept on until I got into a score of fights. 
 
 And then, seeing perhaps that I was never going to quit 
 first, the hosts of the Confederacy agreed to stop if I would. 
 At least, that is the way it appeared to me. 
 
 His letters home give us the most intimate account 
 of his life and thought during these perilous days. 
 His father he boyishly refers to in his letters as "the 
 General", and in one of these he unfolds a view of 
 homesickness and longing in the heart of many a 
 soldier boy of the early sixties: 
 
 I have nothing else to think of but home, and must write to 
 keep off homesickness. It is my favorite way of filling up my 
 unoccupied hours. I would rather write home than read, or 
 even eat, 
 
 and for a healthy soldier this last was surely an abun 
 dant testimony. 
 
 In May, 1863, he was "before Vieksburg", as a 
 letter written to his father bears testimony. This was 
 written, he says, on "Secesh paper". It was his first 
 42 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 battle, and he wrote of it on May 23d, a little more than 
 a week afterwards: 
 
 We neared Jackson on the 13th, trudging along through the 
 dust, when, on coming to the top of a high hill, we saw the 
 5th Minnesota deployed as skirmishers, and advancing slowly 
 into the woods. That looked like fun. 
 
 The brigade formed in line of battle on double quick and 
 loaded, but no enemy was found, so we laid on our arms all 
 night, and next morning in a drenching rain started for Jackson. 
 The boys kept their spirits up remarkably well all day, for we 
 were very close to the enemy, and we were all resolved to eat 
 supper at Jackson. 
 
 About eleven o clock we came upon the Rebs. Our bat 
 teries were placed in position and the 47th were placed to sup 
 port the 2d Iowa Battery. The shell and shot came over our 
 way quite lively, but we all lay down and they passed over us, 
 but the "whoo-oo-oo" of rifle shell sounded around us quite 
 merrily. We were on the brow of a high hill overlooking a 
 wide open field. Through this ran a creek, for which we were 
 contending. 
 
 The Rebs drove our skirmishers back up the field and mor 
 tally wounded a cannoneer in Waterhouse battery. Our bully 
 2d Iowa boys soon silenced the Rebel batteries, and then the 
 order came for us to advance and take the creek. Our officers 
 were all very cool and set good examples for their men. When 
 we received the order to advance, Col. Cromwell asked if he 
 would have time to light his pipe, and rode along our line 
 holloaing for a match. We advanced with fixed bayonets, the 
 2d Brigade in advance driving the "Rebs" steadily before us, 
 and I must give the rascals credit for falling back in fine style. 
 
 We chased them away from the creek, through which we 
 charged in water waist-deep, ran them through the woods into 
 their works, where they checked us for a while, but the 2d 
 Brigade could not be refused, so we up and at em and were the 
 first troops in Jackson. We left Jackson on the 16th and 
 marched all night. We are now in front of Vicksburg in easy 
 range of their batteries, but the country is so full of deep ravines 
 that we are perfectly safe. 
 
 That was the boy s account of the first skirmish in 
 
 43 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 which he carried a musket. In "Drums of the 47th" 
 there is an account of the same skirmish from the view 
 point of the man approaching 70: 
 
 A dull staccato thunder of guns in the distant front, a 
 galloping staff-orderly giving an order to Colonel Cromwell, 
 which he shouted to us; a sudden barking of many commands 
 from the line officers; a double-quicking of the column into the 
 line, and almost in the time I have written it we were in line 
 of battle in the woods before Jackson, Mississippi. 
 
 I heard Captain Frank Biser shouting his customary 
 "instructions to skirmishers" as he deployed A and B com 
 panies into the skirmish line, and they disappeared amid the 
 scrub oaks: "Keep up a rapid fire in the general direction of 
 the enemy, and yell all the time!" He was very specific 
 regarding the kind of "yelling", which was to be emphatically 
 sulphurous. The regiment followed to the brow of the hill 
 that looked down on the creek, winding in muddy swirls and 
 many meanderings across the level meadows. 
 
 Far to our right we could hear our own battery, the Second 
 Iowa, its bronze Napoleons throbbing like a heart of fire. And 
 at our left the Waterhouse Battery, of Chicago, was baying 
 like a wolf-hound at the -gray battalions down by the little 
 Pearl River. We were supporting that battery. And we were 
 ordered to lie down and keep ourselves out of sight. 
 
 This seemed to me excessive caution. I was a recruit in 
 my first battle. I called it a battle. The old soldiers spoke 
 of it as a fight. Whatever it was, I wanted to see it. I rose 
 up on my knees to look about me. It didn t look like any 
 picture of a battle I ever saw in a book. The man with whom I 
 touched elbows at my right, Doc Worthington, of Peoria, 
 and an old schoolfellow before we were comrades, said with a 
 note of admiration in his voice: 
 
 "Haven t those fellows got a splendid line?" 
 
 I saw a long line of gray-jacketed skirmishers doing a 
 beautiful skirmish drill. Puff-puff-puff, the little clouds of 
 blue smoke broke out from the gray line moving through the 
 mist that was drifting across the field. I saw the blue-bloused 
 skirmish line come into view from the woods at the foot of the 
 hill. I saw a man stumble and fall on his face. Not until he 
 
 44 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 did not get up and go on with the advancing line did I realize 
 that he had not stumbled. 
 
 I had a strange trouble with my breath for a boy with 
 lungs like a colt and a heart that is strong unto this day. An 
 officer came riding down the line, pulled up his horse, asked a 
 soldier for a match, calmly lighted his pipe, puffed it into 
 energetic action, and rode down the hill after the skirmishers. 
 How I admired his wonderful coolness! By the time I went 
 into the next battle I knew that the pipe trick was not a symp 
 tom of daredevil, reckless coolness, but only of natural human 
 nervousness. The man smoked because he was too nervous 
 not to. 
 
 I saw the skirmishers now and then rush suddenly together, 
 rallying by fours and squads as a little troop of cavalry menaced 
 the line with a rush a charge, we called it then. I saw them 
 deploy just as quickly, and heard them cheering as a rapid 
 volley admonished the troopers with a few empty saddles. 
 Then I saw the gray line advance resolutely, and with much 
 dodging and zigzagging our own skirmishers were slowly falling 
 back to their line of support. The guns of the Waterhouse 
 battery, fiercely augmenting their clamorous barking, suddenly 
 fell silent. The gunners swabbed out the hot cannon and then 
 stood at their stations. 
 
 " Why do they stop firing? " I asked. 
 
 "They are letting the guns cool," said a corporal. 
 
 "They are going to get out of this," said Worthington; 
 "those fellows are coming up the hill." 
 
 I was looking at a young artilleryman. He was half seated 
 on the hub of one of the Waterhouse guns, resting his face 
 against the arm with which he cushioned the rim of the wheel. 
 He was a boy about my own age, not over nineteen. He was 
 tired, for serving the guns in hot action is fast work and hard 
 work. His lips were parted with his quick breathing. He 
 lifted his face and smiledfat some remark made to him by one 
 of the gunners. His face was handsome in its animation a 
 beautiful boy. 
 
 I heard a sound such as I had never heard before, but I 
 shuddered as I heard it dull and cruel and deadly. A hideous 
 sound, fearsome and hateful. 
 
 The young artilleryman leaped to his feet, his face lifted 
 
 45 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 toward the gray sky, his hands tossed above his head. He 
 reeled, and as a comrade sprang to catch him in his arms the 
 boy cried, his voice shrilling down the line: 
 
 "Murder, boys! Murder! Oh, murder!" 
 
 He clasped his hands over a splotch of crimson that was 
 widening on the blue breast of his red-trimmed jacket and fell 
 into the strong arms of the comrades who carried him to the 
 rear. Him, or It. 
 
 The rain began again and the warm drops fell like tears 
 upon his white face, as though angels were weeping above him. 
 I watched the men carry him away to where the yellow flag 
 marked the mercy station of the field hospital. 
 
 The bugles called sweetly and imperiously, the colonel s 
 voice rang out stern, peremptory, inspiring, the line sprang to 
 its feet, and with mighty shouting rushed forward like unleashed 
 dogs of war. Thundering guns, rattling musketry, cheering 
 and more cheering, a triumphant charge, a wild pursuit, a mad 
 dash we were over the works and into the city. That night 
 my regiment bivouacked in the pleasant grounds of the beau 
 tiful capitol of Mississippi. My first battle, and it was a victory 
 a victory a brilliant victory! And I had a soldier s part in 
 it. How proud I was! I could not sleep. I mentally indited 
 a dozen letters home. And again I whispered a prayer, and 
 looked up my good-night at the stars. 
 
 Calm, silent, tranquil. Undimmed by the smoke of the 
 guns. Unstained by the blood that had smeared the meadow 
 daisies. Unshaken by all the tumult of charging battalions. 
 Sweet and pure, the glittering constellations looked down upon 
 the trampled field and the dismantled forts. Looked down 
 upon the little world in which men lived and slept; loved and 
 hated; fought and died. The quiet, blessed, peaceful starlight. 
 
 Far away, yet thrilling as a night alarm, came dropping 
 down through the starlight the cry that went up from the sodden 
 earth ages and ages ago: 
 
 "Murder! Oh, murder!" 
 
 My thoughts went northward, because I could not sleep, 
 to the little home in Peoria where mother and sisters waited 
 for me. Slowly, although I tried to keep them away, my 
 thoughts came back to the battery on the brow of the wooded 
 hill where the purple violets smiled through the strangling 
 
 46 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 smoke of the guns. With a troubled mind I thought of other 
 mothers and sisters who waited in northern and southern 
 homes. I laid my arm across my face to shut out something 
 that dimmed the starlight and marred the glory of victory 
 with the stain that marked the altar of prayer and sacrifice 
 when the world was young and fair. I would not allow myself 
 to think of hideous and hateful things. I would think of love 
 and home, and the whistle of the robin, the song of the meadow- 
 lark, and the mother voice, soft and sweet and dovelike, cooing 
 the old love songs. 
 
 Still, even as I slept and dreamed of a victory won and of 
 other fields of glory and triumph to come, down through the 
 starlight came the echo of that fainting cry under the wheels 
 of the guns: 
 
 " Murder ! Murder, boys ! Oh, murder ! 
 
 He had his part, too, in the assault before Vicksburg, 
 and concerning this says: 
 
 I was only in one little corner of it, very small, exceeding 
 hot, and extremely dangerous, so that my personal observa 
 tions, being much concerned with myself, were limited by dis 
 tracting circumstances. 
 
 Anyhow, without much regard to my convenience, the 
 assault was ordered at ten o clock that beautiful May morning. 
 Ten hours of the most terrific cannonading I ever heard; the 
 assailing army storming the fortified position of an enemy 
 almost its equal in numerical strength, when one man in a 
 fort is considered the equivalent of seven assailants; Sherman, 
 McClellan, McPherson, Mower, Quinby, Tuttle, Steele, A. J. 
 Smith and Carr, wardogs of mettle and valor. 
 
 Hour after hour they charged the great bastioned forts, 
 each time to be swept back with ranks thinned and scattered, 
 but ready for another grapple. At half -past three in the after 
 noon the brigade to which my regiment belonged Mower s, 
 then the third brigade of Tuttle s division, Fifteenth Army Corps 
 (Sherman s) was ordered, as a forlorn hope, to storm the 
 bastion at Walnut Hills. We charged in column, and as we 
 swept up the hill from the shelter of the ravine, we passed a 
 little group of great generals watching us "go in" Sherman, 
 
 47 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Tuttle and Mower, our corps, division and brigade commanders. 
 Who wouldn t fight before such a "cloud of witnesses"? 
 
 As we passed, Mower detached himself from the group and 
 placed himself at the head of his own men. When we reached 
 the crest of the hill we were met by a withering fire from the 
 fort and stockade and breastworks that struck us in our faces 
 like a whirlwind of flame and iron. We fought through it, 
 close to the fort, when we were finally repelled. Then there 
 happened to me that to which the rest of the day s fighting 
 seemed only preliminary. 
 
 When we fell back slowly, I saw our second lieutenant, 
 Christopher Gilbert, stagger and fall crookedly forward. I 
 thought he was killed, but as I looked for a moment I noted 
 him trying to rise. It wouldn t do to leave him there that 
 was certain death. Robley D. Stout, one of my company, 
 and I ran to him, and lifting him to his feet, drew his arm over 
 our shoulders, and brought him back to the retreating line. 
 He was shot through the leg with a grape-shot and unable to 
 help himself more than to cling to our shoulders. I wished at 
 the time that he were as big as a bale of hay, for his body made 
 a sort of shield for the two youths who were carrying him away 
 from the missiles that still pursued him spitefully as though 
 they were bent on finishing the work they had begun. 
 
 He recovered after a tedious time in hospital, and when 
 he could return to duty the additional bar he won at Vicksburg 
 graced his shoulder-strap, and he was our first lieutenant. 
 
 Years afterwards, referring to this same second 
 lieutenant, he says: 
 
 There were two Gilberts in the company, Chris and Charley, 
 brothers, good boys and good soldiers. I met my lieutenant a 
 few times after the war. Then our lives drifted apart. I 
 became a minister and was pastor of Temple Baptist Church 
 in Los Angeles, California. 
 
 One day my lieutenant came before me, not to give orders, 
 but to take them. He was a prisoner, and his fair captor stood 
 beside him. She had done what Pemberton s sharpshooters 
 in Vicksburg could not do. Love had won my lieutenant. I 
 ordered him to accept the terms of the bride, to "love her, 
 comfort her, cherish her, honor and keep her, till death them 
 did part." And he obeyed willingly. 
 
 48 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 After the service he said : 
 
 " Bob, do you recall the hot afternoon on the slopes before 
 the bastion at Vicksburg?" 
 
 " I was just thinking of it, Lieutenant. And I was wonder 
 ing if now you might ever blame me for helping to drag you out 
 of the range of Pemberton s sharpshooters?" 
 
 "Indeed, no," he said, "I never will. I ve often wondered 
 why the dear Lord sent you back after me. But this is the 
 Why ." 
 
 Such experiences as these burned into his soul an 
 appreciation and admiration for the flag, which inspired 
 his pen to flame forth these words: 
 
 Every time Honor writes a new battle name in gold on 
 the flag she blots the names of a few men off the regimental 
 roll, in blood. That s the price of the battle inscriptions. 
 That s what makes them so precious. The inscriptions are 
 laid on in gold, underlaid and made indelible with blood. No 
 wonder the Flag seems to be a thing of life. Every fold in it 
 is a-quiver with human hearts. When it is fluttering in the 
 wind, it is throbbing. When it is unfurled in the rain, it weeps. 
 The Flag that is the Heart of the Regiment. 
 
 And that it may never grow weak with the years and service, 
 in every battle new hearts, young and brave and loyal, are 
 transfused into the quivering veins of red and white; into the 
 stars of gold on the field of blue. It is the living history of the 
 regiment. It is the roster of the heroic dead, woven into the 
 story of its many conflicts. It is memory and inspiration. It 
 is the visible soul of a cause. So the men of the Union looked 
 upon "Old Glory". So the men of the Confederacy gazed 
 upon the "Stars and Bars" in the days of its hopes, when it 
 flamed above fighting legions of the South. 
 
 The 47th, his regiment, was one of four, which, with 
 the 2d Iowa Battery, composed what is known as the 
 "Eagle Brigade", from the fact that the 8th Wisconsin 
 Regiment of that Brigade carried a young American 
 eagle all through the war. All of the boys were proud 
 4 49 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 of that eagle. While waiting for his discharge at 
 Selma in 1865, he wrote his brother John: 
 
 Obliged to you for the picture of the eagle. I tried to get 
 one to send to you at La Grange, but couldn t. His head wasn t 
 near as white then as now. You needn t give your promised 
 history of the eagle. The 8th Wis. has been in our brigade 
 nearly three years, and the Johnnies knew us as the Eagle 
 Brigade. I have fed "old Abe" with chicken and once got 
 well bit for teasing him. I saw him at Jackson ; he was always 
 carried on that shield by a sergeant right with the colors, and 
 he is fastened by a piece of long twine. At Vicksburg, too, 
 old Abe charged with us; mingling his shrill defiant scream, 
 with the cheers of the men who thought more of him next to 
 "old Joe" than anything else in the Brigade. 
 
 Old Abe knew our partiality for him and many a time have 
 we toiled and sweated and raced after a rabbit merely to give 
 it to old Abe and see him kill it and pick out the good parts, 
 for he was a dainty old feeder; we shared so many chickens 
 and other good contraband grub with him, that if you didn t 
 happen to give him just what suited his palate there was a row. 
 He had a few feathers carried away by a minie ball at Corinth, 
 and has been in every fight with his regimerit. His head was 
 not white when he went home on veteran furlough, but it was 
 when he came back on a visit to us at Memphis, and he looked 
 very much like the photograph. 
 
 And fifty years after the war he wrote: 
 
 He was an eaglet when the war broke out, and enlisted 
 young, like many of the boys who loved him and fought beside 
 him. He was captured on the Flambeau River, Wisconsin, in 
 1861, by a Chippewa Indian, "Chief Sky", who sold him for a 
 bushel of corn. Subsequently a Mr. Mills paid five dollars 
 for him, and presented him to "C" Company of the Eighth 
 Wisconsin Regiment, known as the "Eau Claire Eagles". The 
 soldiers at once adopted him as one of their standards, made 
 him a member of the color-guard, named him in honor of the 
 greatest of the presidents, and he never once disgraced his name. 
 Through thirty-six battles he screamed his "Ha, ha" among 
 the trumpets, smelling the battle afar off, fluttering among the 
 
 50 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 thunder of the captains and the shouting. Never once did he 
 flinch. He was wounded in the assault on Vicksburg and in 
 the battle of Corinth. 
 
 Dear "Old Abe"! I think of him every time I look at a 
 quarter. His portrait makes it big as a dollar. I often wish 
 all my creditors had belonged to the "Eagle Brigade". You 
 see, patriotism not only makes a man s country seem greater; 
 it makes her coinage appear more precious. 
 
 In describing the attitude of some of the unrecon 
 structed Rebel soldiers, he wrote from Selma on May 
 26, 1865: 
 
 One of them so far relied on my magnanimity as to inform 
 me that in addition to being a "nigger" worshipper, aboli- 
 
 tioner, etc., I was a d Lincolnite and that there would be 
 
 more of us go the same way our President (the "baboon" he 
 called him) had. He hasn t relied any on my magnanimity 
 since, nor on any other Yankee s, I don t think, and won t till 
 he gets out of the hospital, for I lifted a piece of board off his 
 head several times, and he is now somewhat indisposed, but 
 very quiet and civil. 
 
 Courageously enough he did his duty through the 
 three years of his enlistment, and yet he hated war and 
 never had anything but condemnation for the spirit 
 that made war necessary. He attacked it always with 
 all the power of his eloquence as the 
 
 destruction of innocent and useful things, the destruction of 
 everything. When we tore up a railway, it wasn t enough to 
 demolish it so that trains could not go over it. We burned the 
 ties. But we made them destroyers of other things in their 
 own fiery death. 
 
 We builded orderly heaps of them because war does not 
 destroy like a blind storm that does not know how to destroy 
 property war destroys scientifically. On top of the ties we 
 laid the iron rails. The heat of the fire furnaced the rails to 
 red-whiteness, and their own weight compelled them to suicide. 
 They bent down in strangling humiliation. Or, if there was 
 
 51 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 time, fifteen or twenty minutes longer, men seized the ends of 
 the rails with improvised tongs of twisted saplings, ran the red 
 center of the rail against a tree, and bent it around the oak in 
 a glowing knot. The enemy could make a new rail in less time 
 than he could straighten out that entanglement. 
 
 He no doubt obeyed orders and "aimed to kill" 
 but of this he seldom spoke or wrote. Once in a letter 
 he wrote: 
 
 I have served eighteen months as an infantryman and a 
 similar period of cavalry arms, participating in twenty-two 
 battles and skirmishes, never having been shot and devoutly 
 hoping that I killed and wounded the same number of the enemy 
 as they have of me. Anyway, I tried to put down the rebellion 
 with a musket larger than myself. 
 
 This truant verse written by him is characteristic: 
 
 Sweet little Major, he mounts my knee, 
 And the tender blue eyes look at me. 
 " Tell me, Popsie, just once more, 
 What did you do when you went to war?" 
 
 And then I tell of the autumn day 
 When the Forty-seventh marched away; 
 How Cromwell died at Jackson town, 
 And Miles on Corinth field went down. 
 
 " But how many rebels, tell me true, 
 
 Did you kill then, and the whole war through?" 
 
 And I tell him then, with eager zest, 
 
 How Jo Reed blew up a limber chest. 
 
 But the Major sticks to his question still, 
 "How many rebels did you kill?" 
 So I tell him how, near the set of sun, 
 The charge was made and the battle won. 
 
 And how, the day McClure was shot 
 When Vicksburg s fight was fierce and hot, 
 Brave Sam Law took C company in 
 Through flame and smoke and the batteries din; 
 52 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 How over our heads the battle broke, 
 With screaming shell and saber stroke, 
 And he wanted to know, the little elf, 
 "But how many men did you kill yourself?" 
 
 "Say, tell me, Popsie, say you will 
 
 How many rebels did you kill?" 
 
 So I told him the truth, as near as might be 
 
 As many of them as they did of me. 
 
 The editor of Bugle Echoes, in a story of Illinois 
 47th, referring to Mr. Burdette, says: 
 
 In the excitement of battle man s inner nature is apt to 
 show forth. A preacher may become profane and a pirate 
 pray. Look into the mild, laughing brown eyes of America s 
 sweetest humorist, read the tender sonnets from his pen or 
 listen to the loving pleadings from his pulpit and imagine, if 
 you can, Robert J. Burdette a tiger in action. 
 
 Yet so he was, every crack of his rifle a joy, his face illu 
 mined; battle was an inspiration and his wit never so nimble as 
 then. One forgets what is said in such an hour. Action leaves 
 only impressions; one remembers fierce imprecations, but not 
 the words; he is conscious of shouts, but knows not wherefore; 
 he laughs at something said, but he forgets what it was. The 
 boys of Company B laughed often with gentle Robert, but 
 laughed loudest upon the battle line." 
 
 He enlisted as a private, and as a private he was 
 discharged at the close of the war. At banquet tables 
 in many after years he sat with distinguished persons 
 of many ranks, titles, and degrees, and to the toast 
 masters, after calling upon Generals, Colonels, and 
 Ambassadors to respond, there was always a sly humor 
 in their calling upon "Private Bob Burdette". But as 
 a private he groomed his horse so perfectly, attended 
 to camp duties so efficiently, performed the details of 
 orderly so courageously, he won the commendation 
 and admiration of ranking officers. 
 
 53 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 An incident he often related was his first personal 
 meeting with Grant. A box of good things from home, 
 the only one, he says, that ever reached him during the 
 War, was the means of introducing him to his Com 
 manding General. His regiment was in camp at Young s 
 Point, La., employed in digging the famous canal 
 designed to carry the fleet around Vicksburg in that 
 campaign. A man of his company came up from the 
 river one day and said, "There is a box addressed to 
 you down on one of the steamboats." 
 
 With a pass to the river and an order for his box, he 
 was on his way in an instant, presenting his order to a 
 civilian commissioner on the boat, only to be in 
 formed that all the stores on the transport, private and 
 public, were the property of the Sanitary Commission, 
 having been seized for use in the hospitals. Having 
 failed in various appeals, the boy suggested there 
 might be letters in the box might he not open it and 
 get them? His account of what followed is char 
 acteristic: 
 
 The big Irish mate followed me to the gangplank. 
 
 " Ye ll get yer box, me lad," he said, "if ye do as I tell ye. 
 Go up on the cabin deck an ask the Ould Man." 
 
 Who was the Old Man? 
 
 " Ould Grant, no less. He kem aboard about an hour ago, 
 an he s up there smokin this minute whin I kem down. Ill 
 pass ye the gyard and ye ll go on up. Come an wid ye." 
 
 He led me up to the cabin deck. There sat the silent, 
 brown-bearded man whose features every soldier knew and 
 whose greatness every western soldier held in unquestioning 
 reverence. I saluted, the mate explained my errand, and the 
 general looked out over the turbid Mississippi and smoked 
 silently while I pleaded my little case. Then he asked for my 
 order. My heart beat high with the hope that he would write 
 a military O.K. across it with magic initials. To my amaze 
 ment, he read it and rose to his feet. "Come with me," he 
 54 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 said. And a bewildered private soldier, escorted by the General 
 Commanding the Military Division of the Mississippi, followed 
 him to the civilian commissioner. 
 
 I pointed out my property, and General Grant handed the 
 order to the civilian. " Give the boy his box," he said simply. 
 The commissioner bowed and I saluted. I wish I could imitate 
 that salute now. It was a combination of reverence, admira 
 tion, kotow and renewed assurance of a distinguished considera 
 tion. Except possibly in China, the general never again 
 received such an all-comprehensive obeisance. 
 
 The cigar between the fingers swept a half-circle of smoke 
 as the Commander, with military punctiliousness, returned the 
 private s salute, and with a half-smile playing under the brown 
 mustache, created, I fear, by that all-comprehensive, unpre 
 cedented salute of mine, he returned to his chair on the cabin 
 deck, while the big mate patted my back all the way to the 
 gangplank. 
 
 Years later he wrote: 
 
 I am not the original Grant man. I was always an honest 
 admirer of Grant s, for I felt and learned in the long Jackson 
 and Vicksburg campaigns the intense devotion to him which 
 inspired every man who ever served under him, and the feeling 
 never left me, never grew weak or faint. But I did not think 
 it wise or right that he should be called back to Washington 
 for a third term, and I was not a Grant man in that sense, last 
 spring. I was a Elaine man. 
 
 Now look back five or six weeks, and see what one man 
 towers above all others in this fight. Never seemed the man 
 Grant so great before. His simple, unquestioning, unselfish 
 patriotism, the grandeur with which he rose superior to every 
 personal question, and unified the sentiment and closed up the 
 ranks of the Republican party by the magnetism of his presence, 
 the straightforward common sense of his short speeches, and 
 the splendid patriotism of his example, commanded and won 
 the admiration, the confidence, the good will of the Republican 
 party to a more universal degree than he ever before possessed it. 
 
 The first soldier of our time, the peerless captain who never 
 knew defeat, yet the citizen Grant is greater even than the 
 general, and the people see it and feel it to be so. There is in 
 
 55 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 all our land, I think, no man who stands so high, and withal so 
 modest, so unambitious for himself I do not believe he is 
 touched with any personal ambition so unselfishly devoted to 
 his country. 
 
 And later yet he wrote: 
 
 Often as I journey to New York, I have time to go out to 
 the stately mausoleum on Riverside Drive, bearing over its 
 portals the message of the great captain to the warring world 
 " Let us have peace." I stand uncovered as I look at the sar 
 cophagus that holds his dust. I think of his greatness and of 
 his simplicity. The courage of the soldier, the rare abilities 
 of the general, and the gentleness of the man. I see him going 
 with a private soldier, and hear him, in the voice that could 
 have moved armies of half a million men, issuing the quiet 
 command that gave to a boy a little box of things from mother. 
 And that picture harmonizes perfectly with all the others. 
 
 The tomb of Grant will always be a monument to the 
 preaching of peace by the silent soldier the greatest of Ameri 
 can soldiers, who never failed in accomplishing the thing he 
 set out to do "who never overrated himself in his dispatches, 
 who never underrated himself in battle." Grant, whose 
 gentleness was equal to his courage, and whose magnanimity 
 equaled his justice. The strongest, bravest, greatest, sweetest 
 soldier! 
 
 With his old colonel, J. D. McClure of Peoria, he 
 maintained an ardent friendship and occasional cor 
 respondence until the death of Colonel McClure. Of 
 him he wrote: 
 
 Of all the colonels under whom I served, Colonel John D. 
 McClure was my ideal. A man with a strong figure and a 
 strong face, a man s voice, deep and commanding; clear, 
 steady eyes. 
 
 For each and all who companioned him during those 
 crucial years he held a reverent memory: 
 
 You can t define "friend" in dictionary terms [he wrote]. 
 And "comrade" that isn t a name; that s a man. Tried by 
 
 56 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 the acid test like pure gold, tried by the fire test; by the wet 
 fleece and the dry; by long marches; by hunger and thirst; 
 by the long line of gleaming bayonets; by the thunder of the 
 big guns; by the fierce reaping hooks of flame; by pain and 
 wounds; by the fierce grip of battle; danger and death. That s 
 what a Grand Army man or a Confederate Veteran means 
 when he says "comrade". How are you going to put all that 
 into a dictionary definition? 
 
 In later life, when referring to one old comrade, he 
 wrote: 
 
 Had we, then, forgotten him so quickly? Forget the 
 comrade who had shared our duties, our privations, our hard 
 ships, our perils? It was nearly fifty years ago that we fired 
 our "farewell shot" over that grave, and a little ache creeps 
 into my heart with the thought of him today. 
 
 It isn t a good thing for a soldier, who every day must face 
 death in some measure, to be depressed in spirit. It unfits 
 him for his duties. The trilling fifes and the merry drums are 
 not to make us forget. They are to remind us that we must 
 be ready for every duty, cheery and brave and faithful. The 
 music of the camp never dims the memory of the comrade who 
 has been called to higher duty. It s the way of the camp, 
 and of the busy world, and it s a good way. I do not believe 
 in wearing mourning for the dead, yet no man loves his friends 
 more dearly than I. I would not say of my loved ones, when 
 they pass on to the perfect life, " They make me gloomy every 
 time I think of them. As a token of my feelings toward them, 
 I darken my sunshine with these sable garments of the night." 
 
 The drums and the bugles were as companions to the 
 spirited boy, who never ceased to be moved by martial 
 music: 
 
 One of our drummers the youngest was a tonic for a 
 faint heart. Johnny Grove; he could drum to beat a hail 
 storm on a tin roof, and he had a heart full of merriment and 
 a tongue as ready as a firecracker. Death came very near to 
 him many times, but he always laughed when he heard the boy, 
 
 57 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 and passed on, and Johnny still lived with a heart as mellow 
 as then it was light, until a few years ago. 
 
 The drums of the Forty-seventh they time a quicker throb 
 to my old heart now, when I think I hear them again, on a 
 rough road and a steep grade. The drummers are old men; 
 old as myself. And again they are playing the regiment into 
 camp. The fifes blow softly as flutes. The roll of the muffled 
 drums, tender as the patter of rain on autumn leaves, times the 
 slow steps of old soldiers with the Dead March to which we 
 listened so oft when life was in the springtime: 
 
 There s nae sorrow there, John; 
 There s neither cauld nor care, John, 
 The day is aye fair 
 F the Land o the Leal. 
 
 But the bugles! Their voices never change. I have heard 
 them in the midst of the storm of war on a blood-drenched 
 battle-field come ringing down the broken lines, breaking 
 through the pungent powder smoke, their voices of command 
 clear as the song of a meadow lark calling through a bank of 
 fog or a cloud of drifting mist. Strangely sweet, the bugle 
 call in the midst of the battle clamor the roar of the guns, 
 the fierce rattle of musketry, "the thunder of the captains and 
 the shouting." Heart-breakingly sweet. The soldier starts 
 sometimes as though he heard the echo of his mother s voice 
 calling him out of the passion of carnage, calling him back to 
 her side back to her arms, back to her tender caresses, sooth 
 ing the storm of battle rage in his young heart calling him to 
 home and peace, with the old love songs, the cooing dove and 
 the whistling robin. 
 
 Then the bugle, sweetly as ever, calls yet more insistently, 
 and a great thundering shout from the colonel drowns the 
 mother- voice "Fix bayonets! Forward guide center 
 double quick follow me, boys!" And the wave of the charge 
 carries the line forward on a billow of cheers in a tempest of 
 fighting madness. And still the bugle calls, just as sweetly 
 and just as insistently as though a beautiful queen were urging 
 her soldiers on to glory and victory Deborah singing "The 
 Charge." 
 
 58 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 How can anything so beautiful set a man on to fight and 
 kill? Well, it does. A soldier in a fatigue uniform looks like 
 a dude alongside of a civilian in his fishing clothes. There is 
 good music in the beer halls; better, sometimes, than you can 
 hear in your home church. A regiment marching down street 
 behind its military band Sunday morning is far more alluring 
 in appearance than the throngs of worshippers straggling along 
 to worship. Why is a battleship more attractive than a 
 ferryboat? 
 
 Mr. Burdette loved the people of the South and 
 they loved him. How could it be otherwise? His 
 forebears dwelt there. There his grandfather lived 
 with his slaves, which he had freed, however, before the 
 war. There his aunts and uncles and cousins live 
 today. Writing of the Southland as he first saw it, 
 he said: 
 
 Such a beautiful country we were marching through, that 
 summer day. A park for loveliness; a granary for fertility. 
 Low hills whose wooded crests smiled on the cornfields that 
 ran down to the emerald meadows. A creek meandering across 
 the plantations, loitering in its broad and shallow bends to 
 photograph the white clouds posing against the soft turquoist 
 skies; stately old plantation homes with their colonial archi 
 tecture; the little villages of negro quarters in the rear; pleas 
 ant orchards and fragrant gardens. 
 
 How beautiful they were, those sweet old southern homes! 
 And dear and fair some of them still stand, here and there in 
 the new South, amid the rush and clatter of modernity and 
 progress, of steam and electricity, gasoline, automobiles and 
 airships, tourists and promoters and prospectors, iron furnaces 
 and coal mines. Not as scolding protests against progress, 
 development and prosperity they are too gentle for that. 
 They stand rather as beautiful memories of all that was sweetest 
 and fairest and best in the Old South. What colonial grace 
 in their white-columned verandas. What stateliness in the 
 heavy cornice; what welcome of hospitality in the spacious 
 doors with their old-time "side-lights," and in the sunny 
 smiles of the many-windowed front. The shadow of pathos 
 
 59 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 rests upon them now, tenderly as the sun-kissed haze of Indian 
 summer days. They temper our nervous desire for " newness " ; 
 they correct our taste for architectural frenzies of many-gabled 
 deformities and varicolored creosote "complexions". They 
 are of the old order, which, like the Old Guard, dies, but never 
 surrenders to modern changes. They stood here before the 
 war. They have been deluged with woe. They have been 
 baptized in sorrows, the bitterness and depth of which our 
 northern homes never knew can not know please God, never 
 will know. 
 
 And some of their anguish has been the common sorrows 
 of all homes in war times the heartache of bereaved mother 
 hood; the agony of widowhood; the loneliness of the orphaned. 
 The loving Father of us all has made the sorrow that is common 
 a healing balm that makes holy and tender the bitterness of 
 the cruel past. The kisses that rained on the faces of the dead 
 have blossomed into the perfumed lilies of consolation for the 
 living. 
 
 He never failed to express his belief in the entire 
 justice of the cause for which the war was fought by 
 the North. At a banquet in Los Angeles, almost 
 fifty years after the close of the war, he took quick and 
 eloquent issue with one of the speakers of the occasion 
 who had finished an unusual eulogy of Robert E. Lee. It 
 was never his disposition, even for courtesy s sake, to 
 sit by when he felt that eloquence was far out-stripping 
 truth. Springing to his feet at the close of the eulogy, 
 and with an intense earnestness and rapidity of 
 speech, he said: 
 
 I do not believe that Robert E. Lee was " one greater than 
 Washington." And I do not think that the supreme agony of 
 the Son of God in the infinite anguish of the trial of Gethsemane 
 should be mentioned in the same sentence, much less compared 
 with, the distress in the mind of a Colonel of a United States 
 Infantry regiment, deliberating on his decision to break his 
 sword and his allegiance to the government which he had sworn 
 to defend against all foreign and domestic foes. For, stripped 
 60 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 of all beauty of eulogy and verbiage of rhetoric, that is what 
 Robert E. Lee did. The weak point in his character was his 
 exaggerated state loyalty. It was his making the state of 
 Virginia greater than the United States the part greater than 
 the whole an impossibility in mathematics or politics. 
 
 There is an indescribable pathos in the tragedy of Lee s 
 life. Almost on the night of which this is the anniversary 
 October 16, 1859 John Brown, in a rebellious uprising against 
 the United States government, captured the little town of 
 Harper s Ferry. Colonel Robert E. Lee and his regiment 
 were sent to suppress the rebellion. He did it in true soldierly 
 manner. On the second of December John Brown was hanged 
 for treason. No one not even his best friends questioned 
 the righteousness of the sentence, the justice of the execution. 
 Could some mighty hand have drawn aside the curtain of the 
 future on that day, it would have revealed to Robert E. Lee, 
 only six short years from that time, himself and John Brown 
 in changed relations. He, in a strange uniform, under a strange 
 flag, hostile to the United States, laying down his sword and 
 surrendering himself to the mercy of the United States Govern 
 ment; surrendering to troops wearing his old uniform, pha- 
 lanxed under the flag which his old regiment carried at the 
 execution of Ossewattamie Brown. He would have seen him 
 self standing at the steps of the scaffold, saved by the gentle 
 ness of the kindliest government on earth. 
 
 In his letter to General Scott, tendering his resignation, 
 Colonel Lee wrote, "Save in defense of my native state, I 
 never desire again to draw my sword." He broke this pledge 
 when, in 1862, he invaded with his armies, the State of Pennsyl 
 vania, a sovereign state, even as was Virginia. From that 
 fatal 3d of July at Gettysburg, Lee s star began to decline. 
 He was never again "the invincible Lee". He made a stand 
 here, a stand there. He never again made a successful advance 
 against the Union troops. He fought like the soldier he was, 
 splendidly magnificently. But hairsbreadth by hairsbreadth, 
 inch by inch, he was forced back to Appomattox. On the 
 9th of April, 1865, John Brown was dead; the slaves were free; 
 Lee had surrendered. 
 
 For the beauty and purity of Robert E. Lee s personal 
 
 61 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 character I have the profoundest reverence. And for his rare 
 soldierly qualities, for his towering abilities in camp and field, 
 for the superb manhood of his life, for the splendid fortitude 
 with which he met reverse and defeat, for all that was truly 
 great in the life and character of the man, I stand with uncov 
 ered reverence before his memory. But I cannot ascribe to 
 him the greatness of absolute perfection and universal suprem 
 acy over all men which has been so lovingly accorded him by 
 the Virginian who is his eloquent eulogist tonight. 
 
 Life in the army furnished him a curriculum with 
 text books from nature and experience, with daily 
 observations on philosophy, psychology, the logic of 
 events and human values, that later gave him the de 
 gree of past master in the understanding of all that 
 pertained to human and spiritual life. He himself said: 
 
 There s a heap of things you learn in the army and in 
 civil life that are not in the book, and nobody can teach them 
 so well as the other soldier. 
 
 The particularly characteristic letter reproduced in 
 facsimile on the following pages shows the reflective 
 and reverent spirit he carried through all the varied 
 instructions of this "open-air college" life. 
 
 His graduation thesis from this college of human 
 experience might be said to have been written years 
 afterward, and reflects not only the experiences those 
 years brought him, but the deep earnestness of spirit 
 of all the following years which so glorified all his life: 
 
 Silence, and the darkness before the dawn. Across the 
 meadows, through fields of trampled grain, and far down the 
 aisles of the forest, the stacked muskets mark the multiplied 
 lines of the bivouac, broken here and there by the dark squares 
 where the batteries are parked. Along all the lines the camp 
 fires smoulder in their ashes. Across the velvet blackness of 
 the sky the starry battalions march in the stately order of a 
 million years squadrons of the glory of God. 
 62 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 
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ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 66 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 Now and then, as a bearded veteran might lightly and 
 smilingly touch the shoulder of a little child, playing at war, 
 proud of his toy gun and paper epaulette, a great star that has 
 flamed the splendor of the Almighty since time began, touches 
 with a flash of golden light the bayonet of a sentinel, guarding 
 the slumbers of his wearied comrades. Tired as the weariest 
 of them, his own eyes burn and his body aches for sleep, but 
 Honor on his right side and Fidelity on his left, wind their 
 mighty arms about him and keep pace with his steady step as 
 he walks his beat. He is but a man, and he may go mad from 
 sleeplessness; but he is a soldier, and he will not sleep. The 
 morning darkness deepens. It gathers the sleeping army into 
 its silent shadows as though to smother it in gloom. 
 
 Into the silence and the night, as a star falling into an abyss, 
 clear, shrill, cheery, insistent, a single bugle sings, like a glad 
 prophecy of morning and light and life, the rippling notes of 
 the reveille. Like an electric thrill the laughing ecstasy runs 
 through all the sleeping, slumbering ranks. A score of regi 
 ments catch up the refrain, and all the bugles infantry, 
 battery and flanking troopers carol the symphony to the 
 morning. Shouting and crowing soldiers swell the chorus with 
 polyphonic augmentation ; the shrill tenors of neighing chargers 
 answer the "sounding of the trumpets, the thunder of the 
 captains and the shouting". 
 
 From all the corrals of the baggage and ammunition trains, 
 the much-derided mule, equally important and essential in 
 the success of the campaign as his aristocratic half-brother, 
 raises his staccato baritone in antiphonal response. The camp, 
 that a moment since lay in such stillness as wrapped the ranks 
 of Sennacherib when the Death Angel breathed on the face of 
 the sleeper, is awake. 
 
 And if one closed his eyes to shut out the gleaming bayonets 
 and the stacked muskets, and the guns, silent and grim, muz 
 zled by their black tompions, and only listened, he might think 
 he was in the midst of a mob of joyous, care-free, happy school 
 boys out on a vacation lark. For a soldier is a man with a 
 boy s heart. The heart of the morning on the march sings in 
 the notes of the reveille joyous, free, exultant; it is the very 
 ecstasy of life; the thrill of strength; the glad sense of fearless 
 ness and confidence; a champion s desire to match his strength 
 
 67 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 against the courage and prowess of a man worth while. On 
 every camp of true-hearted soldiers rises "the sun of Austerlitz. " 
 
 At noon straight over the earth hangs the great blazing 
 sun, as though he poised in his onward flight for just a second, 
 to say, "I want to see the very beginning of it." He flames 
 down on the long trail of yellow dust that stifles the marching 
 columns. The songs are hushed, for the feet are tired and the 
 throats are parched. The fours are straggled across the roads, 
 as the files find the easiest path for the route step. 
 
 Conversation is monosyllabic. A soldier barks out a jest 
 with a sting in it, and catches a snarl in response. A tired 
 man, with a face growing white under the bronze, shakes his 
 canteen at his ear, and decides that he isn t thirsty enough yet. 
 
 A trooper comes galloping from the front with the official 
 envelope sheathed underneath his belt, and is joyously sung 
 and shouted on his way along the rough edges of the road by 
 the sarcastic infantrymen, momentarily grateful for the diver 
 sion of his appearance a human target against which all their 
 shafts of wit and taunt can be launched, with the envy of the 
 soldier with two legs in his hereditary jousting with the one 
 who glories in six. 
 
 The trooper is gone. "The tumult and the shouting dies." 
 Again the long, winding road; the yellow dust; the hills, the 
 blazing sun; the cloudless sky; the tired men; the silent 
 impatience over the step that has been quickened apparently 
 without orders; the long stretch of marching since the last 
 rest; an occasional order barked by a line officer, to correct 
 the too-disordered formation; over all, the hot stillness of noon. 
 The morning breezes died long ago. The air is dead. The 
 leaves on the forest trees that line the road swooned with the 
 prayer for rain in their last faint whisper to the dying zephyr 
 that kissed them in its passing. The dust of mortality covers 
 their brave greenery the same yellow dust that veils the 
 phantom army marching past. 
 
 So far away away in the advance, and far on another 
 road so faint and dull that it scarcely seems to be a sound 
 but rather a sensation that runs past the unguarded portal of 
 the ear to touch the brain the echo of a dream Boom! 
 
 Yet it is deadly clear; fearfully near. Every listless head 
 in the weary ranks is lifted. Questioning eyes answer each 
 
 68 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 other. Every soldier has read the message, shouted so far away 
 by a tongue of flame between black lips. Unconsciously the 
 marching ranks are locked. Instinctively the step is quickened. 
 The man with the whitening face drains his canteen to the last 
 precious drop. He is going to have strength to get to the front 
 with the regiment. Then, if he dies, he will die in the line. 
 
 "Chuck-a-chuck!" the very battery wheels put a defiant 
 tone in the old monotony of their rumbling. "Clippity- 
 clippity!" another galloping trooper goes down the column in 
 a cloud of dust, but this one is garlanded with cheers, and his 
 face lights with a grim smile. "You ll find somebody that ll 
 make you holler when you ketch up with the cavalry!" floats 
 over his shoulder. "It s his deal," laughs a soldier, pulling 
 his belt a buckle-hole tighter. Tramp, tramp, tramp. 
 
 A single rifle shot. Sharp; penetrating; anger and sur 
 prise in its defiant intonation. A score of excited echoes 
 clattering after it from hill and forest. A thrill of nervous 
 tension runs through the column that closes the ranks in orderly 
 formation. Quick, terse orders. Absolute discipline in every 
 movement. The crooked rail fences on either side the road 
 are leveled as by magic as the hands of the men touch them. 
 The column double-quicks out of the road to right and left. 
 Curtaining woods swallow it. 
 
 The men drop on their faces. They are lost from sight. 
 The skirmishers, deploying as they run, swarm down the hill 
 slope to the front like a nest of angry hornets. A handful of 
 shots thrown into the air. They have found the pickets. A 
 fitful rain of skirmish firing; a shot here; a half dozen; a 
 score; silence; another half dozen shots; a cheer and a volley; 
 far away; ringing in clear and close; drifting away almost 
 out of hearing; off to the right; swinging back to the left; 
 coming in nearer; more of them, gathering in numbers and 
 increasing in their intensity; batteries feeling the woods; a 
 long roll of musketry; ringing cheers; thunders of awakening 
 field-guns on right and left. 
 
 The line leaps to its feet and rushes with fixed bayonets to 
 meet the on-coming charge; the yellow clouds have changed 
 to blue and gray; sheafs of fire gleaming through the trees; 
 sickles of death gathering in the bloody harvest; yells of defi 
 ance and screams of agony; shouting of "the old-fashioned 
 
 69 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 colonels" who ride with their men; bayonets gleaming about 
 the smoke-grimed muzzles of the guns; fighting men swarming 
 like locusts into the embrasures; saber and bayonet, sponge 
 staff and rammer, lunge, thrust, cut, and crashing blow; men 
 driven out of the embrasures and over the parapet like dogs 
 before lions; turning again with yelp and snarl, and slashing 
 their way back again like fighting bulldogs, holding every inch 
 they gain; hand to throat and knife to heart; hurrying rein 
 forcements from all sides racing to the crater of smoke and 
 flame; a long wild cheer, swelling in fierce exultant cadences, 
 over and over and over the reversed guns, like the hounds of 
 Acteon, baying at the heels and rending the bodies of the 
 masters for whom but late they fought. 
 
 A white flag fluttering like a frightened dove amidst the 
 smoke and flame, the fury and anguish, the hate and terror, 
 the madness and death of the hell of passion raging over the 
 sodden earth the fort is ours. lo Triumphe! 
 
 Count the dead. Number the hearthstones, whereon the 
 flickering home-light, golden with children s fancies and 
 women s dreams, have been quenched in agony, heartache and 
 blood. Take census of the widows and orphans. Measure 
 the yards of crepe. Gauge the bitter vintage of tears. Yes. 
 They have more than we have. It is our fort. 
 
 We won it fairly. We are the best killers. Man to man, 
 we can kill more of them than they can of us. That establishes 
 the righteousness of any cause. 
 
 The night after the battle isn t so still as the night before. 
 The soldiers are so wearied, mind and body and soul so tired, 
 they moan a little in their sleep. A man babbles in a strange 
 tongue. He was the first man in the embrasure, and he is 
 hurt in the head. He will die before morning. He is talking 
 to his mother, who died in a little Italian mountain village when 
 the soldier was a tiny boy talking to her in the soft, musical 
 tongue she taught him. He hasn t spoken a word of it for 
 many years. But he is going out of this world of misunder 
 standings and strife and wars, into the unmeasured years of 
 peace. Going to God by the way of the old home up the 
 winding mountain path, past the cool spring in the shadow 
 of the great rock, through the door of the little home under 
 the trees such a sweet way to heaven. 
 
 70 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 He is soothing the deadly pain in his head, just as he soothed 
 all his headaches and heartaches twenty years ago, by nestling 
 in her caressing arms and leaning his tired head against her 
 tender breast. No; he doesn t need the chaplain. His mother 
 is comforting him. When a man gets to his mother, it isn t 
 very far, then, to God. 
 
 A colonel sits by a camp fire with his face in his hands. 
 The sentinel hears him say, "0, Christ!" His son was killed 
 at his side, on the slope of the fort. The colonel has been 
 trying to write the boy s mother. But that is harder, a thou 
 sand times harder, than fighting in the death-packed embra 
 sures. The torn sheets of paper lying like great snowflakes 
 about his feet are the letters he has begun. " My precious wife," 
 " Heart of my heart," " My own heart s darling," 
 
 It s a big price to pay for a dirt fort. 
 
 There is a saying that "All s fair in war." But the truth 
 is, nothing is fair in war. The winner has to pay for his win 
 nings about as much as the loser pays for his losses. And the 
 trouble is, neither one can pay spot cash, and have the trans 
 action over and done with. The paying for a fort goes on so 
 long as a winner or loser is left alive heartache and loneliness 
 and longing and poverty and yearning and bitterness. Takes 
 a long, long time to pay for a common dirt fort, fairly won 
 by fair fighting. 
 
 And then, after you ve won it, and have been paying for 
 it so many years, you haven t got it, after all. 
 
 Years after the battle, a journey carried me back to the 
 field that was ploughed into blood-sodden furrows by the iron 
 shares of war s fierce husbandry. And one evening in May I 
 walked, with my wife by my side, out of the little town to show 
 her the fort whose name and story I had seen written in blood 
 and fire and smoke. I had often told her that I could find the 
 place if I were stone blind. I knew my way now. This direc 
 tion from the little river so far from the hill this way from 
 the stone mill. This is the sloping field, sure enough. I 
 remember how my heart pumped itself well-nigh to bursting 
 as I ran up the grade, shouting with the scanty breath I needed 
 for running. And here, at the crest of the slope, was that 
 whirlwind of flame and thunder, the Fort. Here under 
 our feet. 
 
 71 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 The sun was going down and all the west was ruby and 
 amethyst set in a clasp of gold. A red bird was singing a 
 vesper song that throbbed with love-notes. In the door of 
 the cottage, garlanded with vines, a^woman was lifting her 
 happy, laughing face to the lips of a man who, with his coat 
 flung over his arm, had just come in from afield. And in merry 
 circles, and bewildering mazes, over the velvet grasses and the 
 perfumed violets that carpeted the sweet earth where the Fort 
 should have stood, a group of romping children laughed and 
 danced and ran in ever-changing plays, and all the world 
 around that old hell-crater was so sweet and happy with peace 
 and love and tenderness that the heart had to cry because 
 laughter wasn t happy enough to speak its joy and gratitude. 
 I held the hand of my dear wife close against my heart as she 
 nestled a little nearer to my side, and I thanked God that I 
 couldn t find the fort I helped to win. 
 
 It was built to resist plunging solid shot and bursting shell 
 and treacherous mine; the storm of shouting columns and the 
 patient strategy and diligence of engineer and sapper. But 
 God God the all-loving Father, scattered the soft white flakes 
 of snow lighter than drifting down upon it, for a few winters. 
 For a few summers he showered upon it from the drifting clouds 
 light raindrops no bigger than a woman s tears. He let the 
 wandering winds blow gently over it. The sheep grazed upon 
 its slopes. The little children romped and played over it. 
 The clinging vines picked at it with their tiny fingers. And 
 lo! while the soldier s memory yet held the day of its might 
 and strength and terror, it was gone. 
 
 "Then the same day at evening" the evening of the first 
 Sunday; only three days after the agony of Gethsemane; the 
 terror of Olivet, the storm of hate and bigotry on Calvary, the 
 blood and sacrifice, the awful tragedy of the cross, the splendor 
 of the resurrection "came Jesus and stood in the midst and 
 saith unto them, Peace be unto you. 
 
 And the horror and the fear and the anguish were gone. 
 "Then were the Disciples glad." They knew His face by the 
 peace that shone upon it. The benediction of His lips rested 
 on their souls. " Peace." And the storm was over. 
 
 Today, we climb the hill outside the gates of the city, and 
 we cannot find the holy spot whereon they crucified Him. We 
 
 72 
 
ARMY EXPERIENCE 
 
 know the storm of warring human passions, of anger and 
 bigotry and ignorance that raged around His cross. But we 
 cannot find the spot where it stood. For all the green hill is 
 beautiful in the blessed tranquility of the peace that endures. 
 For love is sweeter than life, and stronger than death, and longer 
 than hate. 
 
 The hand of the conqueror and the hand of the vanquished 
 fit into each other in the perfect clasp of friendship. The flag 
 that waved in triumph and the flag that went down in defeat 
 cross their silken folds in graceful emblem of restored brother 
 hood. The gleaming ploughshare turns the brown furrow 
 over the crumbling guns that ploughed the field of life with 
 death. God s hand has smoothed away slope and parapet of 
 the Fort that was won for an hour and lost forever. 
 
 73 
 
A 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 FTER he made his way back from Corinth 
 to Peoria, and was welcomed to the home 
 that had watched for him, prayed for him, 
 was proud of him, he wrote: 
 
 And my mother, her brown hair silvered with the days of 
 my soldiering, held me in her arms and counted the years of 
 her longing and watching with kisses. When she lifted her 
 dear face I saw the story of my marches and battles written 
 there in lines of anguish. If a mother should write her story 
 of the war, she would pluck a white hair from her temple, and 
 dip the living stylus into the chalice of her tears, to write the 
 diary of the days upon her heart. 
 
 Out of these years of activity and dramatic interest, 
 his bubbling nature, as well as necessity, demanded 
 employment, and he sought it in various lines. On 
 one of his frequent visits to his grandfather in Cin 
 cinnati in August of 1866, his mother wrote in a letter 
 which he treasured through all the years: 
 
 I do wish you could have made up your mind to have 
 taught. You could easily have got a school, and you would 
 have had so much time to have read medicine too. They offer 
 from $50.00 to $60.00 in the country schools. That would 
 have kept you nicely and put some by. Mary commences 
 next Monday week. She has had several applications from 
 young ladies, and I think she will have a good school. John 
 gets along about as usual; folds papers a while, goes out and 
 rests a week or two, and then goes back to it again with renewed 
 vigor. 
 
 And adds as a postscript to this letter: 
 74 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 Uncle I. has got the Post Office. Do not know when he 
 takes possession. I expect he could get you a school if you 
 would like to come home. 
 
 This evidences the intense longing of the mother 
 heart to be helpful, and to keep her boy as near her as 
 possible, as well as the fact that they had had many a 
 council as to what he should do. Again in October 
 a letter was sent to him in Cincinnati from a Mr. 
 Cousins, seemingly a neighbor, which shows that he 
 was still seeking employment: 
 
 I do really hope that you will be successful in getting into 
 something that will rejoice your heart, and make your purse 
 stand out with greenbacks. At the same time it will please 
 me very much to see you back here again. 
 
 This letter is interlined in red ink after a character 
 istic fashion by young Burdette, making a running 
 commentary in his whimsical style on every paragraph. 
 
 The holidays found him at home again, and a 
 receipt signed by him December 29th indicates he was 
 soliciting subscriptions for the Peoria Weekly Tran 
 script. Yielding to his mother s persuasions to teach, 
 he was granted December 31, 1866, a Teacher s 
 Certificate, Second Grade, signed by Peoria County 
 Superintendent of Schools, N. E. Worthington, after a 
 satisfactory examination in "Orthography, reading in 
 English, Arithmetic, English Grammar, Modern Geog 
 raphy and the History of the United States." This 
 gained him a position in a school sixteen miles from 
 Peoria, and a letter dated March 16th, 1867, bears the 
 heading "Burdette Academy, near the City of Trivoli," 
 and carries the information that "father is now a 
 gentleman of leisure" and that "school will close the 
 last of March." 
 
 Another letter written from the same place runs as 
 follows: 
 
 75 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 NOTES 
 Explanatory 
 Marginal and 
 Satirical. 
 
 Talk with half a dozen 
 different teachers and 
 compare their various 
 ideas. To get the bright 
 side of a teacher s qual 
 ities and character, talk 
 with a scholar he has 
 thrashed. 
 
 Baseball is as essentially 
 an American game as 
 Cricket is English. I am 
 surprised that it meets 
 with so little favor among 
 the students in the Acad 
 emy. 
 
 c 
 
 The bawl thus produced 
 is one of the most horrible 
 combination of sounds 
 ever grated on mortal 
 ear. I have heard it. 
 
 Outside of the school 
 house, throwing clubs 
 at the door thereof. 
 
 b 
 
 With the Osage club. 
 
 In a horn! 
 
 Usually on the occasion 
 of some Base Bawl 
 Match. 
 
 76 
 
 CHAP. I. 
 
 "Why do I wepe 1> the?" SPOKESHARE. 
 
 Running an Academy is one of the 
 best, most stirring, laziest, energetic, con 
 temptible, beggarly, honorable, profes 
 sions a man can attain to, according as he 
 thinks. a My own establishment goes on 
 very smoothly. I have taken a great 
 interest in the gymnastic recreations of 
 the students. I have organized, even in 
 this out-of-the-way place, two " Base Ball 
 Clubs." 5 One I have named the " Osage" 
 and the other the "Weeping Willow." 
 These clubs are about the thickness of a 
 man s finger at one end and gradually 
 taper off to a fine point. When applied 
 to the lower portion of the anatomy of 
 the back of some of the students, these 
 "clubs" produce the "basest bawl" you 
 ever heard. Fact ! Played a match game 
 with one of the students yesterday. 
 "Osage" club, so called from the hedge 
 where it was obtained, was on the ground 
 with unusual alacrity. "Smallboy" on 
 deck, "Professor" to the bat. Smallboy 
 made a short lively run but was "caught 
 out" a neatly by the "Professor", who 
 brought him back. Smallboy again 
 made a spurt for the home base; Prof. 
 "scored" 5 twice over the legs. Good 
 dodging at the short stop succeeded when 
 Smallboy took the bat over the head. 
 Prof, scored a few more, and the game was 
 over, with the usual noise throughout. 
 My connection with the Academy closes 
 in about two weeks. As a general thing 
 it has been very pleasant, but I don t 
 think I ll "wepe" a great deal when it is 
 through with, though they love me a few. 
 I have several times observed some of the 
 "scollards" in tears d on my account. 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 CHAP. II 
 
 "Ain t I glad to get out of the wilderness? 1 BURNS. 
 "The boy stood on the Burning Deck!" PSLAMS. 
 
 The custom here is to go to bed at 
 sunset and get up some time in the night 8 
 
 and eat breakfast - If b y an y means the 
 ing. This barbarous family fail to retire at dusk, candles are 
 
 custom of getting up lighted and pater familias takes a last 
 
 oejore trie sun, as ij _ . _ 
 
 the sun did not know year newspaper and reads it aloud for the 
 
 amusement and edification of his hearers. 
 ism. it is true that Any one moving around, whispering, 
 
 the early birdcatched whistling in a soft low musical whistle, or 
 
 the worm, but what con- __. 3 . . , . 
 
 solution is that to the shuffling his or her feet, is instantly 
 
 SLtttSf" withered *>y a p iercin g lance > to the 
 
 have been caught. entire satisfaction of the rest of the 
 
 community. Personally, I am very hard 
 to wither. Under ordinary circumstances 
 I do not wilt worth a cent. But when I 
 
 How are the mity falkn? consider myself as merely one of a com- 
 
 Give it up? Because mu nity, I share the awe a which the others 
 
 they can t neither of ... * i /. i *. 
 
 em climb a tree. of the family circle feel for its august head. 
 
 Referring to this experience once, he wrote: 
 
 NEBRASKA CITY, Dec. 3, 1881. 
 
 Why, bless you, boy, I was president of the college; that 
 is, I taught school one winter in district No. 4. "Prof " Wor- 
 thington; Nic. Worthington, was county superintendent that 
 year. And I boarded at James Morris . Ah, talk about the 
 present system of public schools. New stone school house; 
 I was the first teacher. I don t know; must have been forty 
 pupils; maybe fifty. And thirty of them were named Holt. 
 The Holt family had a working majority on joint ballot in 
 that district. William Henry Holt was the smallest boy in 
 school, I think. No, Louis Green was. William Henry was 
 as full of mischief as a shad is of bones, and too good-natured 
 for any one to get cross at. It was a black, barren, uneventful 
 day when that boy couldn t keep up a steady fusilade of potato 
 popguns. Frank Ford was the smartest boy; a hard student, 
 but of very delicate health. John oh, I can t remember 
 
 77 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 names John, the biggest boy, with a pair of shoulders like 
 a giant; best natured and best dispositioned boy in the school. 
 I was always glad of that, for when he stood up beside me I 
 had to lay my head back until my neck ached to look into 
 his big honest face. 
 
 Three months experience seemed to have satisfied 
 him, or satisfied his pupils that his particular talents 
 must be utilized along other lines. Jacob Topping 
 employed him for a short time as a clerk in his crockery 
 store "without fatality to dish or human " as he later 
 recorded, but while working in McBurney s house and 
 sign painting shop an explosion of naptha seriously 
 burned him about the face. It was here he received 
 his first real encouragement to study art and the way 
 was opened by natural stages, which was ultimately to 
 follow through the rest of his career. 
 
 Early in 1868 he wrote: 
 
 I have assumed charge of the United States Railway Mail 
 Service as junior clerk in the Peoria office and extra man for 
 the route agent. 
 
 A letter under date of April 21st, to his aunt, reveals 
 his attitude toward this work: 
 
 I am immersed in business, have ever so much more to 
 do than I can stand up to, have denied myself any kind of 
 pleasure or recreation whatever, devoting my entire time and 
 all my talents to the Government, neglectful of friends and 
 home, deaf to the siren voices of pleasure, blind to the allure 
 ments of the outside world, forgetful of "Evalina", who 
 esteems me a "brute," alike regardless of calls of pleasure, 
 fame, love, or anything else but dinner. 
 
 I am a ghost of the P. 0. entombed amidst its piles of dead- 
 letters, wandering aimlessly about amidst its bewildering 
 mazes of "cases", pigeon holes, lock boxes, through pouches, 
 way boxes, "tie-sacks", brass-locks, paper and "Dis" cases; 
 devoid of feeling as the toughest mail sack in the service, it 
 matters little to me how much or how horribly, with stamp 
 
 78 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 whose steel is no harder than a mailing clerk s heart I mar the 
 spotless surface of some delicate perfumed billet, or smash 
 the "pictur" of some unhappy swain who had practiced for 
 hours to acquire the peculiarly sweet expression of face and 
 feature exhibited on such occasions, which my rude hand has 
 "smollixed". 
 
 Wedding cards, sheriff s notices, duns, love letters, all pass 
 alike through careless hands; from early morning till late at 
 night I scatter broadcast over the land my strangely assorted 
 messages. Sending to some homes tidings of joy unspeakable, 
 news of some loved one long mourned as dead mayhap, tossing 
 with the same hand a swift-footed messenger of heart-crushing 
 woe into homes, but a moment before the happiest in the world, 
 sending to some lonely wanderer words of cheer and encourage 
 ment from dear ones at home, white-winged messengers of love, 
 weighted with the hopes and longings of tender hearts and true, 
 side by side with them messages of darkest portent, words of 
 bitter wrath and undying hatred, oh, Lum, the mystery of one 
 hour s work of mine! If I knew everything I sent out I don t 
 believe I or any man could do it. But "where ignorance is 
 bliss, etc." I whistle, laugh and sing as though I were handling 
 chips instead of 
 
 Shortly after, under quite another temper of spirit, 
 he wrote to this same correspondent: 
 
 Our life here is always woefully checkered. For one day 
 of cloudless summer, we count weary weeks of changing April 
 and drear December. From the cradle to the grave it is only 
 a pilgrimage, not a pleasure jaunt, and sorrow and disappoint 
 ment we must all look for at every step of our toilsome march. 
 But we look beyond all these. Each night a day s journey 
 nearer home, nearer through with earth and its storms, its 
 chill blasts of disappointment that embitter our life, its great 
 load of sorrows that crowd out our joys from our hearts, sor 
 rows that sweep over our skies like dark clouds shutting us 
 out from the glorious sunlight streaming above them. These 
 must be endured, the cross must be carried, but how much 
 lighter it is when loving hands bear up its crushing weight, and 
 strong, tender arms support the form that faints beneath it. 
 Sorrow we cannot escape, but when it comes tis naught to 
 
 79 
 
ROBERT J. BTJRDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 bear, if loving hearts but share it with us. But I won t preach 
 to you any longer. I don t want to make anyone blue because 
 I have a fit on. 
 
 Many years afterward, when interviewed concern 
 ing this service to the Federal Government, he said: 
 
 I was in the railway mail service when there really wasn t 
 any such thing. I was a route agent, a "router" who ran a 
 short line, and had lots to do, and few people to boss him.. I 
 ran from Peoria, 111., to Logansport, and, my boy, those were 
 great days. I had one end of a big car, and the baggage and 
 the baggage agent had the other, which made it convenient 
 for us to swap lies when there wasn t much to do. Everything 
 would go all right in the mail line during the spring and summer, 
 but after that came the "winter of our discontent" when far 
 mers began to ship apples. They would be loaded on the front 
 of the baggage car, making it very heavy and a load itself. 
 I would have about three hundred pounds of mail, much of it 
 in the cases all distributed. Things would go along all right 
 until we struck the bridge three or four miles out of Logansport. 
 The train would strike that bridge with a jolt and swing that 
 was awful, and almost every time it would jolt all my mail in 
 the light end of the car out of the cases and mix it up on the 
 floor. That would break my young heart, and many a day I 
 have cried and worked those few miles like a little boy. 
 
 Then I remember the time I had throwing papers off while 
 the train was moving. I had a package for Red Mill when I 
 didn t know the road very well. As I came up to the place 
 I let the package fly. It went right through one of the mill 
 windows, and a train of profanity followed me to the next 
 station. Next trip I decided to throw that package off in time, 
 so in my anxiety I threw it off a quarter of a mile too soon and 
 saw it floating down the river back of us. I was so disgusted 
 that when I saw a package for Cross Roads 22, I just said to 
 myself, "I ll be blamed if I ll throw it off," and I carried it 
 back to Peoria. 
 
 I was in Washington just after Frank Hatton was appointed 
 postmaster-general, so I went to congratulate him. You 
 80 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 know Frank and I were on the Hawk-Eye together. Frank 
 said to me: "Bob, you were in the service yourself one time, 
 weren t you?" 
 
 I confessed. 
 
 "Well, I ll show you your record." 
 
 I said I hoped to goodness he wouldn t do anything like 
 that, but he flashed up a lot of books which showed that I 
 had missent an awful lot of stuff, and it was still hanging over 
 me. You see I was the only man on my run, and on the Illinois 
 Central South they had two clerks, so when I got a good deal 
 of mail and didn t feel well I bunched the whole thing up and 
 sent it to the "I. C. South". There it was in Washington 
 checked up against me. As it was all true, I couldn t say a 
 word, but I thought it was pretty tough to hold that up against 
 a fellow so long. 
 
 Frank thought it was a good joke. But I said to him, 
 "Well, I ll take that, but I can tell one on you." Frank said 
 to go ahead, and I said: 
 
 "When you were appointed postmaster-general, Frank, 
 you sent your valet to the senate to hear all the gossip he 
 could about what the senators said when your name was sent 
 in for confirmation." 
 
 "Well?" said Frank. 
 
 And when he came back you asked him very eagerly what 
 nice things the senators said, and he replied: "Oh, they just 
 laughed." Well, Frank didn t hold any more things over my 
 head that day. 
 
 In April he wrote to his Aunt: 
 Father is not well. Mother is feeble. 
 
 And this mother who gave her life cheerfully to the 
 bearing and caring for ten children at the early age of 
 forty-five, faded and passed on, June 23, 1868. Mary, 
 the "little mother", wrote of her to her brother Rob a 
 few weeks later: 
 
 When my longing heart cries out for the mother, who, 
 for so many years cared for us with love so unselfish, so untir 
 ing, and taught us so many lessons of patient and unwavering 
 6 81 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 trust in God when I think of her and long for her with desire 
 so intense that it seems as if she must come, and then awake 
 to the very startling truth that she has gone from earth forever, 
 and we must live without her year after year, involuntary 
 sighs escape, and the tears, unbidden, start, but we sorrow not 
 as those without hope. . . . May we not cherish the hope 
 that our mother in the perfect life of peace and purity and bliss 
 ful rest, may guide us more truly than she could have done in 
 this world of turmoil and strife and sin. I love to think thus, 
 and the fond hope goes very far to soften the pain of separation. 
 
 Soon after his mother s death, he left Peoria for 
 New York to enter Cooper Institute, for the instruction 
 the friend had encouraged him to believe would be 
 worth the struggle. 
 
 October 31st he wrote a letter from Cincinnati to 
 the Peoria Transcript, signed "Rob Burdette." After 
 a visit in Pruntytown, his father s birthplace, and 
 arriving in New York early in December, he wrote on 
 the 10th his first New York letter to the Peoria Tran 
 script. Having passed through Philadelphia, he wrote 
 of it as the "checker-board town": 
 
 It is the worst place in the world for anybody that was 
 not born there. Its long endless streets without a curve or a 
 wrinkle through their entire length, their interminable rows of 
 white shutters, all standing open alike and closing at the same 
 instant with mathematical precision and undeviating regularity, 
 the awful primness which stares you in the face from the early 
 drab of morning to their broad-brimmed sunset, gives the stran 
 ger a kind of straight-jacket feeling. 
 
 He says of New York: 
 
 But this delightful old mixed-up place, where every avenue 
 you take loses itself in a maze of entanglements, where the 
 stranger, after securing full and definite instructions from a 
 policeman who can speak English, buttons up his coat and 
 resolutely starts out to somewhere, and after turning the first 
 two corners as per directions, finds himself back at the same 
 82 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 identical corner and policeman he started from; where the 
 streets take a malicious delight in leading the wayfarer up 
 against a dead wall or out to some wharf; where everything 
 is so crooked that were a man to walk rapidly enough he could 
 almost see himself going down another street. This is home 
 like. This is refreshing. This is America. 
 
 He also wrote: 
 
 General Grant left this city today. The closeness with 
 which he has been watched during his stay, precludes any possi 
 bility of his having stolen anything. Early in the morning the 
 distinguished smoker aired himself on Broadway, visiting 
 Frederick s picture gallery, A. T. Stewart s new store, and 
 attended the wedding reception of Mr. Hamilton Fish s daugh 
 ter. Gen. Geo. B. McClellan called on the President-elect at 
 the St. Nicholas, and was in private conference with him for 
 over an hour. As the nature of the conference between the 
 young "Napoleon of the West" and his chief is entirely un 
 known, everybody puts his own construction on it. I believe 
 a majority of the political prophets have conceded to "Little 
 Mac" a seat in Ulysses cabinet. From his penchant for 
 spades, I think he would be more at home in the Department 
 of Agriculture. 
 
 I have not been able to help noticing, however, as I jour 
 neyed eastward, the rapid development of the pannier. I 
 believe there was one visible in Peoria when I left. At Cincin 
 nati, Fourth Street wore one timidly and awkwardly, evidently 
 half afraid of them; at Washington, Pennsylvania Avenue 
 sported them awkwardly, but numerous; Baltimore worried 
 a very defiant one; at Philadelphia, Chestnut Street arrayed 
 herself in them as a garment, and here, oh my! it s a case of 
 nudity not to have one on. They are clearly a success. They 
 have been "reviled and persecuted of men," but they have 
 risen triumphant over the storm of abuse and sarcasm which 
 has beat upon them. 
 
 The power of his descriptive pen was strongly and 
 delightfully shown in another letter to the Transcript, 
 under date of January 19, 1869: 
 
 83 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Not to "do" Plymouth Church is never to have been at 
 or near Brooklyn, and more from a desire to see all the "lions" 
 of this vicinity, than from any expectation of great good result 
 ing from the pilgrimage, I consulted the universal guide book, 
 the police, and wended my way to this house of worship, last 
 Sunday night. It s easily found. After reaching Brooklyn 
 you have only to follow the crowds that you see converging 
 from all directions to a common center. That center is Ply 
 mouth Church. 
 
 I thought I would stroll leisurely down past the edifice so 
 as to be sure of its exact locality before going there for the eve 
 ning service. I knew that the congregation began to assemble 
 long before the doors were open, but I was somewhat surprised 
 on making my early reconnoissance to discover a crowd of nearly 
 two hundred people collected on the sidewalk and in the street 
 in front of the closed gates of the church yard, standing patiently 
 there in the midst of a driving snow storm. 
 
 I mingled with these zealous pleasure seekers, and stood 
 with them looking at a plain, unpretending, common-looking 
 brick church, nothing gothic or imposing about it; its style of 
 architecture might have been copied from any frontier church. 
 A stranger passing through Brooklyn would not give it a second 
 look, if perchance his eye rested on it at all. Nevertheless this 
 is Henry Ward Beecher s church. 
 
 When the doors were opened, all strangers and visitors, 
 all persons not pew owners, were seated in the galleries or the 
 back seats to await, up to a certain hour, the arrival of pew 
 holders, after which all the seats were thrown open, and Jew 
 and Gentile, the pew holder and the sojourner in the land, take 
 their chances alike, and are seated here, there and everywhere 
 with democratic impartiality. 
 
 The long row of benches around the gallery was densely 
 crowded with tourists, interlopers and plebeians long before 
 the pews began to fill. I was amazed when an energetic usher 
 ordered us to sit closer together, and actually got about a dozen 
 more worshippers seated. Scarcely had we got settled into 
 breathing postures again, when the same usher, inexorable as 
 a street car conductor, packed us still closer and wedged in 
 another delegation, and there we sat, our arms hanging down 
 before us, hands solemnly clasped on our knees, jammed and 
 84 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 pressed so tightly together, wrought into such intimate con 
 tact, that I could almost tell what my neighbor was thinking 
 about, and had the usher trod on the corns of the man at the 
 end of the seat, I believe all the rest of us would have " hollered ". 
 
 But the pews began to fill up rapidly, and when the organist 
 took his place and with masterly touches filled the room with 
 grand impressive symphonies, the pews were opened to all, 
 seats were let down across the aisle, the crowd that had been 
 waiting outside the door came thronging in, and in a few min 
 utes not a single seat, not a foot of vacant space could be seen 
 in the house, nothing but a dense motionless sea of heads, a 
 mass of silent, quiet, expectant humanity. 
 
 The interior of the church is as plain and simple as its 
 exterior appearance. The pews are white, finished with dark 
 colored polished wood, and though cushions are laid along all 
 the pews, the backs of none of them are cushioned or even 
 curved. A single circlet of gas in the centre of the ceiling lights 
 the spacious auditorium. The first gallery runs clear around 
 the room to the organ, which is built over and back of the pulpit. 
 Its wood work is massive, rich-looking black walnut, and is 
 not decked off with a profusion of gilded pipes and tinsel flour 
 ishes. Everything about the church inside and out is charac 
 terized by a delightful homelike simplicity. On a stand by the 
 pulpit, and on the table beside Mr. Beecher s chair, you can 
 always see beautiful bouquets, the only ornaments in the place, 
 and what more fitting decorations can we find for the house 
 of God than the beautiful creations of His own hand? Besides 
 this first gallery a second one is built across the end of the 
 room like the ordinary galleries of your western churches. 
 Ahem! This was also filled to repletion. 
 
 Mr. Beecher s sermon, was of course, characteristic. His 
 services have been described time and again by better and 
 more glowing pens than mine (this one I am using now is a 
 Washington Medallion), hence I will not attempt a description. 
 One is charmed with him at the very outset. His delivery is 
 perfect, every word reaches the most distant corners of the 
 room, clear and distinct; his manner is at all times earnest, 
 seldom excited, but always impressive, always carrying his 
 audience with him. 
 
 Murmurs of laughter by his audience frequently interrupt 
 his sermon. Sometimes they are very hearty outbursts. But 
 
 85 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 whenever you hear the audience laugh, be sure a telling blow 
 has been struck, or an argument clinched in a masterly manner. 
 You cannot for the life of you help laughing at some of his 
 illustrations and remarks, while you feel their force and vigor 
 and depth through all their coating of humor, quaint and 
 original. I never was a very great admirer of Mr. Beecher 
 until Sunday night. Now I can t help feeling that my previous 
 estimate of him has been a very unjust one. One seems to 
 feel what the man really is, while listening to him. 
 
 And then his church is such a home-like place. The entire 
 absence of formality, the simplicity and uniformity of every 
 thing around you, make you feel as much at home there, as if 
 you paid seven or eight hundred dollars for a pew. And when 
 ever any of my Peoria friends come to see me, we will go to 
 hear Dr. Crosby (in my humble estimation the best preacher 
 in New York) our first Sunday morning, and at night I ll drag 
 them over to Brooklyn. 
 
 This was the sketch of a young man not yet recog 
 nized as even a newspaper man and whose fondest 
 dreams did not include the fact that later he was to en 
 joy the personal friendship of Mr. Beecher, nor that 
 in 1887, when a memorial was being prepared for the 
 Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, which was restricted to 
 letters and literary contributions of a limited number 
 from the most distinguished men and women of 
 America and Europe, Edward W. Bok, who was gather 
 ing this material, asked Mr. Burdette to make his 
 contribution in the following manner: 
 
 It is the special desire of the large number of Mr. Beecher s 
 friends interested in this final tribute to his memory that it 
 shall contain a contribution from the pen of a gentleman whom 
 the renowned patriot preacher so warmly admired, and whose 
 efforts to lighten the burdens of others he frequently referred 
 to during his lifetime. 
 
 In making this request of you, Mr. Burdette, I beg that 
 you will believe that it is one uppermost with me, and the 
 granting of which I should esteem indeed a high favor. 
 86 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 From the promises and contributions already in hand, 
 including Generals Sherman, Fremont, and Howard, Admiral 
 Porter, Canon Farrar, Dr. Talmage, Dr. Neuman Hall, Mrs. 
 Gen l. Grant, Mrs. Garfield, Henry Irving, Mde. Modjeska, 
 Mme. Janauscheck, Dion Boucicault and a host of others 
 equally famous, the memorial to Mr. Beecher promises to be 
 most notable, and we should feel that Mr. Beecher s personal 
 wish was carried out, could he but express it, were it to receive 
 a contribution from your ready pen. 
 
 A few words of remembrance from you would give us all 
 sincere pleasure, and I am therefore particularly anxious that 
 you will grant it. 
 
 I can scarcely be too urgent in my request for your kind 
 and valuable co-operation, and I fervently hope that you will 
 extend this courtesy. 
 
 Again writing from New York, in a Transcript 
 letter on the celebration of St. Patrick s day, he wrote: 
 
 It seems that St. Patrick s day in the morning is a different 
 man from the same fellow in the afternoon. Of course, at 
 night the "drowning of the Shamrock" was successfully per 
 formed wherever it was attempted, and was attempted wherever 
 two or three Irishmen could be found. I didn t stay up to 
 see this interesting part of the celebration, but sought my virtu 
 ous couch at an early hour, happy that S. P. D. had arrived, 
 for I was tired of cold weather, and though I well knew that "one 
 swallow does not make a summer," I was confident that there 
 would be enough swallows in New York that night to make a 
 complete set of seasons. But if such was the case, they have 
 started another winter by overdoing the thing, for although we 
 had a slight glimpse of spring when St. Patrick was here, this 
 morning is cold enough to remind one of that touching little 
 stanza of Robert Browning s: 
 
 " The first bird of spring 
 Attempted to sing, 
 
 But ere he had rounded a note, 
 He fell from the limb, 
 And a dead bird was him, 
 
 For the music had friz in his throat." 
 
 Maybe that isn t Browning. I wouldn t be positive. 
 
 87 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Robert J. Burdette always declared he went to 
 New York with the avowed intention of ultimately 
 "painting a great historic painting that was to cover a 
 canvas as big as the side of a barn, with buckets of 
 paint and a name made famous signed in the corner/ 
 But a letter to "Dear Lum" reveals some of the things 
 he actually did, for he said: 
 
 The tubes of color would have cost fifty dollars, to say 
 nothing of the dryer and oil varnish, but I was never able at 
 that time to raise the fifty dollars. 
 
 New York did not seem to want any "great artist", 
 at least not so young a one. 
 
 I presume that in the natural order of things you have 
 sagely concluded that I have forgotten all about you in the 
 whirl and tumult and bustle of a Metropolitan existence. 
 Nay, not so, but I m mortal busy, although I do feel terribly 
 ashamed of my outrageous neglect of my best correspondent, 
 the first one I ever had. I obtained soon after coming here, 
 a clerkship with the Equitable Life Assurance Society, but 
 left that position a week ago and am now following my own 
 occupation, card writing, which is just as remunerative as the 
 other and gives me more time to prosecute my studies. You 
 wouldn t think that a man who covers paper with scrawls like 
 this could write visiting cards, but on fancy lettering I can 
 just knock the socks off of a printing machine. 
 
 I am attending night class in the school of Art at Cooper 
 Institute, and I have fallen among a lot of good friends here, 
 through whose influence I expect to get a ticket to the Academy 
 of Design. I write cards about half the week or less, that 
 meets the week s expenses, and the rest of the time goes in 
 hard study. I never think of going to bed before twelve o clock 
 and I have written as late as two or three o clock in the morning. 
 I m not making any money, barely meeting necessary expenses, 
 but I m finishing my education and getting a profession that 
 has money in it. Have you noticed any of my "versatile 
 and talented " productions floating around in the current liter 
 ature of the day? There s lots of it. 
 
 88 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 I have a real nice snug cozy room and when " Uncle " 
 Andrew comes I am prepared to do the honors of my house 
 and show him around the city. Had he come here Christmas 
 he would have found me at a hotel, the "Belmont" down in 
 the city, near Broadway. Now I have a nice room in a private 
 house, up on 17th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. I m 
 thoroughly posted on New York and its vicinity, am very 
 metropolitan, and this stirring lively old town hasn t many 
 places of interest that I don t know the ropes of. 
 
 It s a small village. I only live two miles from the City 
 Hall, and you can t find the town built closer than it is around 
 me. The village is about twenty-two miles in area and since 
 I left Virginia I haven t seen a single patch of real live wild 
 woods, nor enough fresh free air to keep a rat alive. My time 
 is all my own now, so if any one wants to be shown around, 
 let them come. I ll be only too glad to see a familiar face, 
 for at times I m woefully homesick. 
 
 I am becoming acquainted in a real good circle of people, 
 but I don t want to go out much, or I ll have to keep it up, 
 which would encroach too much on my precious precious time. 
 But to a cove who always took as much delight in home and 
 home pleasures and comforts as I did, this thing of living 
 amongst perfect strangers is pretty hard, and it s going to be 
 an awful pull to make out two years of it. But I can t really 
 make myself what I want to be in any less time. So here s 
 for it. 
 
 I am already established at "Ralph Wells " Mission 
 Sunday School (Grace Mission), the greatest Mission School in 
 the United States, as Scriptural Artist, and the way the black 
 board is illuminated every Sunday astonishes Gotham. The 
 lesson is always illustrated on the board. I have already 
 perpetrated Jacob s ladder, Rebekah at the well, and some other 
 difficult pieces. The drawings are made in colored crayon, 
 very large, and have been highly and favorably commented on. 
 I have no doubt of my ultimate success; it only requires cour 
 age and steady application. 
 
 Bless you, when I came here the city was and is now so 
 overflowed with young men unable to get any kind of employ 
 ment that the Herald and Tribune were urging them to leave 
 the city and go anywhere, rather than stay here and starve. 
 
 89 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 It rubbed me very hard for a while but I hung on, knew only 
 one, just one man in all this great city, and I got a situation, 
 and now, I, a rough chap from the prairies, a youth whose 
 penmanship is execrable, who never put a foot inside of a com 
 mercial college, or received a mite of instruction in fancy letter 
 ing, am here in New York City, getting plenty of work to do 
 in one of their finest vocations, and contending successfully 
 against well established, cultured, finished opposition. 
 
 A man can make his way anywhere, if he only trusts in 
 God and pulls off his coat and shows that he means business. 
 I don t believe God ever helps any man that lays on his back 
 and prays, though he pray ever so lustily. A man wants to 
 feel and pray as though God was going to do everything, and 
 then get right off of his knees and go to work as though he had 
 it all to do himself, and God wasn t to help him in the least. 
 
 End of the sermon. 
 
 In March he went down to Washington to attend 
 the inauguration, caught a severe cold and was obliged 
 to go to the hospital in Baltimore. Conditions follow 
 ing this were to put to severe test his usual optimism, 
 courage and faith, as shown by a letter written in early 
 summer: 
 
 Nobody knows, nobody ever shall know the half that I 
 have suffered during this long dark cruel winter. Struggling 
 alone, against established business, for a sure position; sick, 
 tired, disappointed time and time again, almost driven to 
 believe at times, that my attempt was a failure, how could I 
 write to any one? It is all over now, thank God, but it has 
 been terrible. But the prize is well worth it; I am now begin 
 ning to see before me the realization of my hopes, the fruits 
 of all these sufferings and struggles a name position and 
 Carrie. Night after night, I ve robbed my pillow and given 
 its time to my pen, urged on and sustained a great deal by love, 
 a great deal by ambition. 
 
 Always keenly observant, but with little opportunity 
 to have acquired sufficient knowledge to dare to offer 
 critical opinion, it is somewhat surprising that he should 
 90 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 have written, in less than six months after he reached 
 New York, the following review: 
 
 The National Academy of Design is now thrown open to 
 the public, on its 44th annual exhibition. The academy build 
 ing itself, situated on Twenty-third Street, opposite the magnif 
 icent new building of the Young Men s Christian Association, 
 attracts the eye by the singularity of its architecture, being 
 modelled after a building on the Rialto, in Venice. The attend 
 ance at the exhibition this year has not been so large as formerly, 
 and the public have been grievously disappointed at the dis 
 play of paintings, and the art critics, outside artists and con 
 noisseurs have handled the academy artists without gloves, 
 and abused the pictures in all the ferocious terms of which art 
 will admit. New York artists are always wrangling about 
 something. Recently the bone of contention has been studios. 
 When the Y. M. C. A. building is completed, these knights of 
 the palette and easel will have new haunts, as there will be 
 some twenty excellent studios in that edifice. 
 
 Of course, at these exhibitions there will always be jealousies 
 and bickerings and discontent, and in this case, as usual, the 
 best places in the rooms are appropriated to some very " wood- 
 eny" productions of the academicians, while some really 
 excellent paintings of other artists are consigned to the corridor, 
 where no artist likes to see his pictures hanging. Aside from 
 this mismanagement, which is palpable to every one, the dis 
 play of paintings is highly creditable to American art. 
 
 There is but little promise, in the paintings now on exhi 
 bition at the academy, of many future Raphaels or Claudes or 
 Turners, and only once in a while, as you pass through the 
 building, are you attracted very strikingly by any picture. 
 Kensett has a very beautiful picture here, "Lake George"; a 
 fine sense of beauty glows throughout the painting, which is 
 pure Raphael in its delicacy of detail and exquisite finish, and 
 is in delightful contrast with many subjects around it, whose 
 colors are opaque and muddy, and the drawing stiff and unnat 
 ural. Durand, long president of the academy, whose name is 
 in high honor by American artists, gives this exhibition his 
 farewell productions. A new and younger class of artists have 
 rather been crowding in between him and the public favor, for 
 
 91 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Durand once painted for the love of art, and now he does so 
 for money, and gold is a wretched substitute for an enthusiastic 
 devotion to art. His "Trysting Tree" is marked by his usual 
 truthfulness of conception and beauty of execution. Eliza 
 Greatorex, very recently elected as associate of the academy, 
 has some pen and ink sketches, finely executed, but of no 
 striking beauty. 
 
 "Gettysburg," in the sculpture room, is like all battle 
 pieces, and will answer just as well for any other "burg". A 
 General (Meade, I believe) and staff loom up beside a medicine 
 wagon, and the usual number of wounded men are reclining 
 in picturesque attitudes, looking very interesting in their neatly 
 fitting uniforms and bandaged heads, as I never saw wounded 
 men look, and a little further on some others are supporting 
 themselves on their elbows, and while a charging regiment 
 tramples over them, and their life blood gushes out, are waving 
 their hats, and, I doubt not, in the poetic conception of the 
 artist, shouting "All hail to the stars and stripes!" 
 
 Many a wounded soldier, loyal and brave, have I heard 
 swear like a pirate while he struggled to get out of the way, 
 but never a one did I know who lay still and said "All hail, 
 etc.", or make any other such ill-timed remarks. Ritchie s 
 " Deathbed of Lincoln" falls far below this artist s other efforts. 
 The subject, an unpleasant one in itself, is treated without any 
 refinement. 
 
 I lingered long before "Early Grief" by Constant Mayer. 
 A poor girl in mourning over a dead bird, the conception is 
 beautiful and the execution perfect. It hardly seems like a 
 work of art. You look at the grieving child, her sorrows made 
 all the more touching by her poor dress, and picturesque by 
 the woodland scenes around her, and you almost expect to see 
 the little lips grieve, and the mournful eyes in their tearful 
 beauty, lift to yours. The empty wicker cage is touchingly 
 suggestive, and beside it lies the body of the silent songster, 
 the sole joy and pet of the little grief-stricken figure mourning 
 over it. There is a world of pathos in the face of the girl, 
 wearing that expression of pent-up grief just ready to break 
 forth in sobs. The sentiment of the painting is in perfect 
 keeping with its execution, and the picture well displays that 
 rare faculty which Constant Mayer possesses of infusing a 
 charming poetry into his pictures. 
 92 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 In chilling contrast with this gem, you pause before a 
 "Portrait of a Gentleman", without some dozen or so of which 
 no gallery is complete. A stupid, unmeaning face, with nothing 
 of expression of beauty in the face, and altogether would look 
 well in the dark, or on a tavern sign. Then there is a sea scene. 
 A large cast iron, bottle-green breaker is coming in, or rather 
 has been coming in, but has stopped, the top is curved over 
 with beautiful precision, and in one place where it breaks 
 against two well developed three-cornered rocks the dashing 
 spray looks like the terrific explosion of a barrel of flour. This 
 study would make an excellent design for a fire board, if it is 
 in the N. A. D. 
 
 Beard s "Raining cats and dogs" is funny and I like it, 
 although it is rank heresy to say so, for it is condemned by the 
 art critics as unworthy such an artist. Its drawing and com 
 position are good, but the subject is beneath the notice of art, 
 they say. The painting is an illustration of the old expression 
 which is given as its title. A pelting storm of savage dogs and 
 felines is coming down in a way that is a caution to "umberills". 
 Here a hapless tabby is squelched by falling a la spread eagle, 
 there two savage dogs have touched terra firma in safety, and 
 fallen upon each other s necks and things in fierce combat; 
 then a ferocious Thomas feline, with swollen narrative and 
 indignant fur, approaches a second T. F., who is somewhat 
 discomposed by his trip from the clouds, and timidly declines 
 the first T. F. s belligerent overtures. The background is filled 
 in with indiscriminate dog fights, and the air is dark with falling, 
 howling, fighting cani-felinity. (How is that?) But the critics 
 condemn the subject because it is unworthy of the genius of 
 Beard, and by the same reason they outlaw his "There was 
 an old woman who lived in a shoe", the funniest picture in 
 the world. It s indescribable. The big shoe, lying under the 
 hill, the colony of children scattered over the foreground, in 
 all the phases of devilment and mischief that children can get 
 into, the old woman issuing forth to administer the well-known 
 broth and castigation. Oh, who that ever was a child and 
 revelled in the beauties of "Mother Goose Melodies" but 
 would like this picture? 
 
 I admire an artist who dares paint for the people, just as 
 I admire musicians who dare sing and play for the people. 
 
 93 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Rossini and "Claribel" are dead. The world had to stand still 
 a little while when the great maestro died, and a London musi 
 cal journal gives half a column of sneers at "Claribel", but for 
 all these sneers, how much of "Claribel s" music will reach 
 hearts that Rossini s will never touch. I would rather laugh 
 all day over Beard s " Old Woman, etc." than wander among 
 twenty academies filled with these tiresome high art landscapes, 
 with their monotony of green meadows and blue mountains 
 and gray rocks, with here and there an impossible cow, and 
 everywhere the inevitable man with the red shirt and the fish 
 ing pole. And if a highly cultivated, correct taste leads us to 
 prefer the thunder and crash, and roar, and operatic dissonance 
 of the "peace jubilee" to the simple, charming melodies we 
 have listened to in the home circle, then I desire that my taste 
 should ever be vicious and ungraded. It is amusing to listen 
 to a knot of art critics and connoisseurs tear a picture to pieces. 
 They are not artists themselves, couldn t whitewash a fence, 
 much less paint a landscape, but they are well up in the rules 
 of art, and very few pictures escape their ravages. It is cus 
 tomary to first pronounce the painting a daub, on general 
 principles; then the drawing is hard, stiff, poor, the coloring 
 is weak, wretched in fact, the perspective is faulty, the whole 
 thing is decidedly "woodeny". The composition is attacked, 
 and you often learn that a picture which had struck you as a 
 fine painting, is only a mass of inaccuracies and violations of 
 beauty and harmony, unfit for a political transparency. "Ars 
 probat artificem." 
 
 In September, 1869, he wrote to his aunt from "217 
 West 17th Street, New York City ", which he designated 
 as "the home of the friendless and the friend of the 
 homeless street", saying he was still studying at Cooper 
 Institute, taking "French, German and Art", and 
 intended to go to Europe the following spring with 
 prospects as occasional reporter on New York papers. 
 This letter, written partially in rhyme, and filled with 
 outrageous punning, admitted that financial necessities 
 were very great. It was not difficult, under such 
 94 
 
FINDING HIMSELF 
 
 circumstances, to throw down the pencil and brush, 
 and follow off on an expedition of which he later wrote: 
 
 I was an Art student in New York, ambitious and dreaming 
 of the day when I should paint a historical painting of the 
 scenes of blood and carnage that I had witnessed during the 
 war. It gradually dawned on me I was going to do a splendid 
 imitation of "The Dying Skeleton" first. Just then I had a 
 chance to go to Cuba in the ten year war. Went on the Lillian; 
 she was a British ship, or used to be. Was what the sailors 
 call a " Pickpocket ", very swift, but burning so much coal and oil 
 that she ate up all of the profits of an honest voyage. She was 
 a dandy blockade runner, however, and dodged in and out of 
 the Southern ports during our Civil War, so she was just the 
 craft for a filibustering expedition. We had to land some arms 
 one dark night. Now don t tell me Spaniards can t shoot. 
 They shot me that night the first time they fired; in the dark 
 too, and I was the smallest man on the boat. I was sent back 
 to Savannah, went into the hospital, and had my cracked 
 plating repaired. 
 
 Returning to New York, physically out of condition 
 and disspirited, a most welcome letter was soon received 
 from Enoch Emery, the editor of the Peoria Transcript, 
 asking him to return and take a position on the paper. 
 He counted his cash and found he had just enough for 
 a ticket, and leaving his drawing board, crayons and 
 books where he last used them at Cooper Institute, he 
 packed his few personal belongings and taking a little 
 three dollar wooden clock under his arm, he abandoned 
 the brush for the pen and started back to Peoria. That 
 little clock was one of his valued possessions all his life, 
 and stands today above a book case in his study in 
 Sunnycrest, where it still ticked as the heart of its 
 possessor ceased to beat in response, and goes on 
 marking time here while he has entered upon an 
 eternity of time unmarked by day or night. 
 
 95 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 THIS transition from self-expression by brush 
 to self-expression by pen, he referred to when 
 the Transcript had become the Herald Tran- 
 script, and was celebrating a golden jubilee, 
 and he wrote of his work: 
 
 My first appearance in cold type was in the columns of 
 the Transcript. The article was a letter I wrote to my father 
 from the army when I was a soldier in the 47th Illinois. It 
 appeared some time, I think, in 1862 or 63. Then afterwards 
 I entered the world of journalism by the same path. I will 
 never forget my first night on the Transcript. I was telegraph 
 editor, and "Phocian" Howard, then on the editorial staff, 
 under the Emerys, sat down at my desk and wrote down for 
 me on a slip of paper the proof marks I was to use. I have 
 done some newspaper and literary work since that night, but 
 nothing that has ever puffed me up with wicked and vaunting 
 pride; nothing that has looked so clear and strong and illumi 
 nating in type, as the "the s" and "and s" I inserted in the 
 night despatches, and the thrilling scare heads I wrote over 
 the most commonplace paragraphs. 
 
 I do not know what the world of critics thought, or may 
 think, of my work in that edition of the Transcript, but it was 
 what I called "Literature". 
 
 The proof marks referred to were preserved for 
 thirty-five years, the original piece of paper, 4x5 inches, 
 being pasted in a scrap book. 
 
 Another interview ran: 
 
 The Transcript is my newspaper Alma Mater. I began in 
 telegraph flimsy on this palladium of liberty in 1869. Enoch 
 Emery was the proprietor and editor. John Emery was second 
 in command; George Kent was city editor; Sam Patton was 
 96 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 foreman; George Keady held the "ad" case, and I well, I 
 hate to say it, but I ran the paper, at least I thought I did, 
 which was the same thing. 
 
 Soon after beginning the reportorial work, he was 
 sent out for an interview, of which he often spoke in the 
 later years, when he himself was a lecturer and being 
 interviewed by some abashed reporter: 
 
 Back in 1870 I was a "new man" on the Peoria Transcript 
 and just about the hour that I became an employe of the 
 paper, Horace Greeley arrived in Peoria. I was assigned to 
 the Greeley story by the city editor and started out to inter 
 view him. 
 
 After I had sent my card up to Mr. Greeley, I began to 
 wish I had it back. I hoped that he would not be in his room 
 and that, if he was, he would refuse to see me. He was in his 
 room and he did not refuse to see me. Then, how scared I was. 
 
 I knocked on the door and Mr. Greeley called out: 
 
 "Come in." 
 
 I went in and was so badly frightened that I could not 
 think what to talk about, but finally, I ventured : 
 
 "You have been lecturing, have you not, Mr. Greeley?" 
 
 Answer "Yes." 
 
 Then it was so quiet that you could have heard the microbes 
 gnaw if there had been a smallpox patient around. 
 
 I sat there for a minute or two and was getting more fright 
 ened every minute. At last I thought of another question. 
 
 "Have your lectures been successful, Mr. Greeley?" 
 
 "Young man," he replied, "do you know what a successful 
 lecture is?" 
 
 I didn t know and I owned up that I didn t. Then Mr. 
 Greeley explained that a successful lecture is one where more 
 people stay in than go out. He wound up by telling me that 
 his lectures had been "successful". 
 
 The dominant influence of this period of his life was 
 the " Carrie " referred to in one of his New York letters 
 and for whom love and ambition had spurred him on. 
 Carrie S. Garrett was born in Peoria December 5, 1847, 
 
 ,7 97 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 and came of a stock as sturdy and active as that of 
 young Burdette. Her father, Auren Garrett, as a boy 
 came to Peoria with his father, Col. Augustus 0. Gar 
 rett, who placed his family and goods on a schooner 
 bound from Buffalo to the then trading post at Chicago, 
 arriving in August, 1833. They found a marshy place 
 with some scattered log huts, a few white people and 
 native Indian tribes. Inducements were offered them 
 to locate there, but they preferred Peoria, which at this 
 time was a thriving western village. 
 
 Garrett the elder was an experienced man of affairs, 
 of fine appearance, and he established and operated the 
 Peoria Hotel, the first hotel in Peoria. Here was organ 
 ized the first church of Peoria, St. Jude s, and the first 
 Masonic Lodge, with the elder Garrett as vestryman of 
 one and officer of the other. In 1840 Col. Garrett 
 opened a new hotel, the Planter House, the largest and 
 best hotel in the State and the scene of the early social 
 and political life of Peoria. Here Martin Van Buren 
 was entertained on his memorable visit in 1842, and 
 Lincoln and other noted men of the time were frequent 
 guests and familiar acquaintances of the family. 
 
 Auren Garrett, Mr. Burdette s future father-in-law, 
 inherited his father s courage and adventurous spirit, 
 for in 1835 he accompanied a party of United States 
 troops removing the Pottawatomie Indians to the then 
 far West, two hundred miles beyond Council Bluffs. 
 On the return trip the party saw no white man between 
 Fort Leavenworth and Rock Island. At that time 
 Davenport, for whom the city of Davenport, Iowa, took 
 its name, was running the ferry between Rock Island 
 and the Iowa shore, and was the only white man then 
 living on the site of the present prosperous city. 
 
 Miss Garrett was married to Mr. Burdette on 
 March 4, 1870, when she was an invalid, and so feeble 
 
 98 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 that her responses could only be made by a slight 
 movement of the eye and a pressure of the hand. She 
 later rallied somewhat, but always remained an invalid. 
 A sister, Medorah Garrett, who was her constant 
 attendant at this time, went with them to their new 
 home, and remained a devoted member of the family 
 until her own death in 1910. 
 
 Carrie Garrett was a young woman possessed of 
 rare qualities of mind and character, strength and 
 sweetness. Two pen pictures her husband sketched of 
 her years after her sufferings had ceased, and his 
 tender memory visualizes her thus: 
 
 There stands by my side a girlish figure, slender, delicate, 
 an oval face, with lips most daintily graven by Nature s tender- 
 est caresses; eyes of brown, clear, tender, loving, joyous; in 
 silken waves the dark hair falls away from the brow of snow. 
 Hands of a child rest on my arms. She stands there a picture 
 of morning. Hope shines in her radiant eyes. Faith sings in 
 the intonations of her voice. Such courage burns in the heart 
 of her; such lofty inspiration throbs in her soul, as not even 
 her lover could have dreamed in that summer time when all 
 our days were made of gold and our nights of silver. It is 
 my sweetheart. 
 
 The small, one-story brick house in which Mr. 
 Burdette and his bride began housekeeping was built 
 by Auren Garrett in 1846 at the foot of the bluff fronting 
 on Perry Avenue, and was given by him to the young 
 people at the time of their marriage. 
 
 This home, which was founded on love alone, 
 brought insistent demands upon him, providing for 
 its maintenance, straining every energy he possessed 
 in newspaper activity. The continued suffering tore 
 at his heart-strings, but his sympathy and love and 
 tender care of wife so appealed to the public, which 
 was growing to be his personal friend, that it honored 
 
 99 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 him for this unusual demonstration of unstinted devo 
 tion and abandon of unselfishness which was always to 
 remain one of the high lights of his character. She, in 
 turn, gave him the inspiration and steadying influence 
 his brilliant talents and unrestrained nature needed. 
 
 During the year on the Transcript he had become 
 the city editor, and his humor more and more crept 
 into the local page. One day he was sent for by the 
 editor, who sought to sternly repress him: 
 
 "Sit down, Mr. Burdette," said Mr. Emery. "I 
 understand that only one of the two lunatics that got 
 away from the crazy house last week has been recap 
 tured. What has become of the other? " 
 
 "Why why stammered the local editor. 
 "Why, I haven t any idea, Mr. Emery. How should 
 IT" 
 
 "Oh, I don t know," responded the chief. "I 
 thought possibly he might be secreted somewhere 
 about this building and that you might know about 
 him." 
 
 "I haven t any knowledge of him at all," said the 
 puzzled Burdette. 
 
 "Then it must have been that drunken man I met 
 going down the stairs last night," continued Emery, 
 "or possibly you have some friend with a feeble mind 
 who gets into this office with false keys. Anyway, 
 somebody has been giving a lot of infernal drivel to 
 the foreman lately, and it s been printed on your page. 
 I wouldn t insult your intelligence, Bob, by assuming 
 that it got in with your knowledge, but you must have 
 been mighty heedless of late and you really must be 
 more careful in the future. Seriously," he continued 
 in a meant- to-be-not-unkindly tone, "you should not 
 try to write humor. When I want anything funny in 
 the paper I ll write it myself." 
 
 100 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 He bade me learn to walk before I tried to prance, but it 
 was so much more fun to prance, so I went over on an after 
 noon paper called the Review, and kept on prancing. 
 
 His passing from the Transcript to the Peoria Review 
 gave him a field of humorous writing that he had not 
 before enjoyed, but the freedom of pen was not without 
 limitation, for the original Peoria Review suspended, 
 and the material was sold to the proprietors of the 
 Transcript and Democrat. It did not, however, stay 
 suspended long, for a number of the employees con 
 nected with the old paper started a small daily with the 
 same name. An injunction was obtained preventing 
 the use of the name "Review," and for a while the new 
 paper was published as The Peoria Evening Injunction. 
 
 "Bob says they will publish the paper if they have 
 to change the name fifty times a day/ was the welcome 
 the Illinois Sentinel gave it. The injunction, however, 
 was finally dissolved and the Review had a precarious 
 career for a few years, finally dying a slow death by 
 starvation. 
 
 Mr. Burdette was one of those concerned with the 
 founding of the new Review, and its columns reflected 
 the liveliness of his humorous imagination. Crude and 
 bald were many of his humorous sketches, and yet they 
 indicated the versatility of his fancy, and gave the 
 promise which was afterwards fulfilled when he went 
 to the Hawk-Eye. "Lively as a cricket" was the com 
 ment of one of its contemporaries, as to the new paper, 
 and even so conservative a paper as the Springfield, 
 Massachusetts, Republican, noted at once its individ 
 uality and the genius of the youthful Burdette, and 
 warned the "Danbury news man" to look to his laurels. 
 One of his daring contributions he tells of himself: 
 
 When I was younger than I now am by 15 years, I was 
 writing up immortal dog fights and fadeless "river news", and 
 
 101 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 undying "real estate transfers", and soul-inspiring "proceed 
 ings of the city council" on the Peoria Review. Among many 
 valuable contributors, every man, woman and child in the 
 State of Illinois used to write for that very able and influential 
 journal. 
 
 There was one young man who weighed about as many 
 years as myself, against whom I conceived a violent hatred. 
 Not a personal spite, oh, no; but he used to steal poetry and 
 use the paper as a "fence". He would deliberately copy 
 something from Burns, or Byron, or Tennyson and write above 
 it "By J. Watson Wallingford", and in it would go, fourth page, 
 leaded. 
 
 He was in favor with the management, somehow, and 
 being a subaltern, I was restrained from sitting down upon him. 
 I wanted to, but I "dassent". I had a very large salary to 
 get on that journal, and did not propose to quarrel with my 
 bread there was no butter by outspoken revolt. 
 
 But one day, all the great and wise men on the paper went 
 down to Galesburg to a district convention, and J. Watson 
 Wallingtord came in with "A Song by J. Watson Walling 
 ford ", and a little note from the manager ordering it in fourth 
 page, lead, that day. I read the stanzas after the poet went 
 away. The poem was one of Byron s "Stanzas for Music", 
 so I couldn t complain about the poetry, but I couldn t just 
 see why Wallingford should call it "A Song". 
 
 I will admit right here that I do not read music at sight; 
 I can t even read a grace note at ten days sight. I do not know 
 much about music. I can play on the kazoo a little when the 
 tune is easy. But it seemed to me that for " A Song " that poem 
 looked kind of bare and friendless. There was nothing to 
 indicate that it was a song, except the title, and the title of a 
 poem or the text of a sermon does not necessarily indicate the 
 subject treated in the discourse. If it was "A Song" it was 
 doubtless intended to be sung, and how could people sing it 
 unless the tune was indicated? 
 
 Suppose each one of our readers, on receiving a copy of the 
 Review containing that song, should attempt to sing it to some 
 tune of his own? What discord would ensue ! As a Journalist 
 with a large J. I could not cast such a brand of discord upon 
 the country. I was determined, if that "Song" went in the 
 102 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 paper as a "Song", that it should at least be sung in harmony 
 by our readers and I would be the "precentor" myself. 
 
 I pondered over those stanzas for a long time, until at 
 length I hit upon a jingle that seemed to fit. I carefully locked 
 the sanctum door to keep the printers from getting at me and 
 slaying me, and sang the "Song" clear through. Then I 
 wrote a little editorial paragraph calling attention to it, and 
 predicting that it would become the most popular campaign 
 song of the century, and, when the paper came out that after 
 noon, J. Watson Wallingford and his friends were pleased, I 
 think, to see his poem in this fair guise: 
 
 A SONG 
 
 BY J. WATSON WALLINGFORD 
 (Tune "Vilikins and His Dinah") 
 
 I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name, 
 There is grief in the sound, there is guilt in thy fame; 
 But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart 
 The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart. 
 
 With my tu-ri-li, u-ri-li, u-ri-li a, 
 
 Singing tu ri li, u ri li, u ri li - a; 
 etc., etc. 
 
 And so on through the five stanzas of the well-known poem. 
 It did look too pretty in print for anything. I went out in the 
 news room and the printers, each holding a copy of the paper 
 in his hands, stood up and sang it. The effect was thrilling. 
 
 But the music didn t fairly begin until that night, after 
 the edition was all worked off and the mails were gone, and 
 "the management" returned from the convention. Music in 
 the air! There was English opera for you. The poor poet 
 cried. The editor-in-chief wanted to laugh, but couldn t, 
 because the directors were mad. Everybody talked at once 
 and abused me, although I contended that my act was a musical 
 inspiration that saved the "Song" from derision. I claimed 
 that the "Song" was incomplete without a tune and a refrain. 
 
 You see Peoria is Emma Abbott s native town, and every 
 thing of a musical character there is very severely criticised, 
 and I said I wanted to maintain the credit of the town. No 
 good; the poet only cried harder, said he was disgraced for- 
 
 103 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 ever, and the directors all agreed with him, and none of them, 
 in the supreme selfishness of their grief, ever thought how 
 Byron would like it. 
 
 At one time I half wished I had allowed the "Song" to 
 go in the incomplete, ragged state in which it came to my hands. 
 But then I reflected that I had only done my duty as a journal 
 ist, and if necessary I was ready to go to the steak for it; rare 
 and no gravy. Finally, matters were adjusted. I was per 
 mitted to retain my position on the editorial staff of the paper 
 on condition that I publish a personal apology to J. Watson 
 Wallingford. To this I agreed. 
 
 I wrote the apology the next day and sent it to the com 
 posing room. But when it came up in proof, J. Watson Walling 
 ford was sent for. He and the manager and two directors read 
 it, and held a brief consultation over it, to which council I was 
 not invited, but the foreman told me that it came back marked 
 "dead". It never was published. I don t know what was 
 wrong with it. I had labored over it a long time, and thought 
 it was as good an apology as I had ever seen go out of the shops. 
 I went down stairs and asked the pressman if he knew what 
 was the trouble, and he said he thought "she had slipped an 
 eccentric, and was only workin one side when he saw her". 
 
 These months were full of excitement and anxiety. 
 
 The Review marked an era in our journalistic career which we 
 lived to ponder over with tears. It was the only daily paper 
 we ever helped to start. It precious soon got the start of every 
 body connected with it. We had that little twilight twinkler 
 for nearly a quarter of a year. Then it had us the rest of the 
 time. 
 
 A Burlington friend afterwards met him on the 
 street and asked him how his Peoria paper succeeded. 
 "Did you make much money?" 
 
 "Money!" repeated Burdette. "Money! Did 
 you ever start a paper?" 
 
 "No, I believe not," said the Burlington man. 
 
 "Well, you ought to try it. I started one once. 
 Yes, I started one. We called it the Peoria Review, 
 and it was started to fill a long-felt want." 
 104 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 "Did you have any partners?" 
 
 "Yes, Jerry Cochrane was my partner. There were 
 several comforting things about that paper. For 
 instance, Jerry and I always knew on Monday morn 
 ing that we would never have money enough on Sat 
 urday night to pay the hands off, and we never had. 
 The hands knew it, too, so they were never shocked by 
 disappointment. We ran that way for a while, getting 
 more deeply in debt all the time. At last one morning 
 I entered the office and found Jerry looking rather 
 solemn. 
 
 " Jerry/ said I, you need another partner/ 
 
 " Yes, we need a new one/ he rejoined. 
 
 " A business man/ said I. 
 
 " One with executive ability/ said he. 
 
 " A financier/ I observed. 
 
 " One who can take hold of things and turn them 
 into money/ he concluded. 
 
 " Then I have got the man you want/ said I, and 
 I introduced him to Frank Hitchcock, the sheriff. 
 Jerry said Frank was the man he had been looking for, 
 so we installed him at once." 
 
 "Was Hitchcock a good business man?" asked the 
 friend. 
 
 "Oh, yes," said Burdette, "everything he touched 
 turned into money. He proved to be all we had antic 
 ipated and he ran the paper with the greatest success 
 until he turned that into money." 
 
 "What was the final result?" 
 
 "Well, when we wound up there was nothing left 
 but two passes one to Cincinnati and one to Burling 
 ton. We divided them up and went in different direc 
 tions." 
 
 Referring to this same experience at a banquet of 
 newspaper men many years later, he said: 
 
 105 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 There has somehow gotten into the mind of the great 
 public which exists for the support of newspaper men and 
 journalists the latter crowding the census by thousands where 
 the former sit solitary that the newspaper publisher is a man 
 of vast wealth, most of which is predatory. 
 
 There are exceptions. I was a newspaper publisher once. 
 The distinction didn t last much longer than Mulvaney s 
 chevrons. But the experience was wild, thrilling, exciting. 
 Falling down stairs with a kitchen stove wouldn t have com 
 pensated me for the loss of it. It was the old printer s story 
 of "a nonpareil paper in a bourgeois town". By manufacturing 
 all the news, local and foreign, at the desk, I saved the expense 
 of reporters and the Associated Press franchise. And that 
 with Melville Stone living at Toulon, only forty miles away. 
 
 And I always had news enough to fill the paper to the limit, 
 which was the Chase. I or rather "we" never permitted 
 advertising matter to crowd out the news. Or anything else. 
 And the news was of a character to keep the hair of the town 
 on end like, frets upon the porkful quilcupine. 
 
 But, alas! a skyrocket isn t a comet. And even a comet 
 isn t a planet. Somehow I lacked the publisher s instinct. 
 My paper came down. I don t even know where it lit. But 
 I stayed up. Higher than a kite. And I ve been up ever since. 
 Cloudland is good enough for me. Oh, I come down occasion 
 ally to buy groceries and ask a publisher for my check. But 
 I don t live down here. I vote in California. I look back 
 upon my experience as "editor and publisher" like unto the 
 man who wakes up in the morning under the bed; crawls out 
 and sees his "hat of the highest" hanging on the gas-burner 
 with the jet full head on blazing through the crown thereof; 
 all the pictures on the floor and all his clothes hanging on the 
 picture-hooks; windows wide open and the snow blowing in; 
 everything where nothing should be and nothing where any 
 thing should be "Gee! what a glorious time I must have had 
 last night!" It was splendid but it wasn t newspaper publish 
 ing. I wouldn t have missed it for a thousand dollars. I didn t. 
 
 While the owners of the Burlington Hawk-Eye had 
 noted with increasing interest the liveliness of the 
 Review columns, upon its death they had resolved to 
 
 106 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 take young Burdette to themselves, where he might 
 have a wider field and freer opportunity for his humor 
 ous and philosophical writings. Of this transition 
 period Mr. Burdette wrote: 
 
 While I was looking around for something to do I thought 
 of the Burlington Hawk-Eye. It was a sober, staid old paper, 
 financially solid. I was young and active. Thought I, I can 
 do that paper good. If I can get on the staff I am sure it will 
 do me good. Well, I was thinking of going over there, when 
 one day its business manager, Mr. Wheeler, came to see me, 
 and offered me a position as city editor and reporter. If I 
 live ten thousand years it will not be long enough time for me 
 to be sufficiently thankful that I accepted the offer, and besides 
 that, I am proud of the fact they sent for me. 
 
 His feeling of gratitude can be well understood when 
 we review his nearly ten years of struggle in an effort 
 to find his place and in which he had made two, if not 
 three, distinct failures. As a school teacher he admitted 
 himself to be wholly without qualification. His life in 
 New York was checkered with hope and despair, and 
 in the end he was reluctantly compelled to abandon his 
 dream of becoming an artist. The Review, which he 
 helped to establish with much youthful enthusiasm, 
 had a brief span of life and its collapse forced him again 
 to look for a position. 
 
 And yet, notwithstanding it all, he brought to 
 Burlington the same optimism, the same irrepressible 
 humor and the same determination to succeed that he 
 might have had had he never met with failure at all. 
 Indeed, the first picture we have of him at Burlington, 
 which was in October, 1874, is that of the young man 
 with a distinct gift for story telling and its humorous 
 embellishment, making his acquaintances laugh to 
 tears with an account of the collapse of the Peoria 
 Review enterprise. 
 
 107 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 George S. Jamison, with whom he spent his first 
 Sunday in Burlington, writes entertainingly his remi 
 niscence of the humorist s first appearance in Bur 
 lington: 
 
 He arrived in Burlington on a Saturday evening in time to 
 attend a performance at the old Union Hall, the then theatre 
 of the town, where he was introduced by the late Major Black- 
 mar, formerly of the Hawk-Eye company, to a fellow scribe. 
 "Bob" made an engagement with his new acquaintance to 
 meet him Sunday afternoon and the two strolled about meeting 
 a few others who joined the party. They repaired to the office 
 of the Pullman Palace Car Company, at the former Union 
 depot, where Mr. Burdette was urged to tell his experiences 
 running a newspaper in Peoria without capital. The recital 
 proved a "first night" success, as the audience was later found 
 in different stages of convulsions, some under the desks of the 
 office, some gasping for more wind power to laugh with, others 
 steadying themselves by the gas brackets while they howled in 
 incoherent glee, and the remainder lay limp and paralyzed over 
 trunks and other bric-a-brac of the Pullman Company. 
 
 From that Sunday afternoon Mr. Burdette was a marked 
 man. The newspaper men took to him instantaneously, being 
 attracted, as thousands of other people since have been, by 
 his personal magnetism, which he possesses in so marked a 
 degree. 
 
 One of Mr. Burdette s associates of the Hawk-Eye 
 tells the following story, which illustrates his abounding 
 resourcefulness: 
 
 One night Bob and his editorial chum, Al Leadley, long 
 since gone over to the better world, were lazying, and the fore 
 man of the composing room descended on them with the com 
 plaint that it was eleven P. M. and he hadn t a line of "city" 
 yet. " That s too bad," said Burdette; " just watch our smoke, 
 John." And at one A. M. the same foreman came down on the 
 double quick and yelled, "for Heaven s sake quit, I ve got 
 more stuff now than I could use in two nights." 
 
 108 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 Mr. Burdette was assigned to report a Republican 
 convention one afternoon. As the district was new to 
 him, the late Frank Hatton, the owner of the Hawk-Eye, 
 went to the hall and kept him posted as to the identity 
 of the various speakers. A boy ran to the Hawk-Eye 
 office with Mr. Burdette s copy, with the result that 
 the Hawk-Eye extra greeted the delegates as they were 
 leaving the hall. This was the more surprising as the 
 Burlington Hawk-Eye was such a staid old paper. 
 
 The Burlington Hawk-Eye surely was a staid old 
 paper. Established by James G. Edwards, the first 
 number was published June 6, 1839, under the name 
 "Iowa Patriot." Burlington had become the capital 
 of the Territory of Iowa and Mr. Edwards had profited 
 by a portion of the territorial printing, and he con 
 cluded to accept the invitation of Burlington people 
 to remove his plant from Fort Madison to Burlington. 
 This was the embryo of the Burlington Hawk-Eye. 
 In October, 1874, Edwards and Beardsley transferred 
 the property to the Hawk-Eye Publishing Company, 
 with Frank Hatton the president and editor-in-chief, 
 Robert J. Burdette, city and later managing editor, 
 Charles Beardsley and J. L. Waite, associate editors. 
 The business managers under Hatton s administration 
 were successively C. Y. Wheeler, Major H. W. Hall, 
 John W. Burdette. In 1879 Hatton was appointed 
 postmaster of Burlington, and passed on to Postmaster 
 General of the United States under President Arthur. 
 
 The clearest account of his first connection with the 
 Burlington Hawk-Eye is given us by J. E. Calkins, who 
 succeeded Mr. Burdette as city editor of the Hawk-Eye 
 and served in that capacity for a number of years. He 
 it was to whose desk came Mr. Burdette s letters written 
 as "Roaming Robert" letters, while he was upon the 
 
 109 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 road to fill his platform engagements. The friendship 
 between the two men that began at that time lasted 
 until the death of Mr. Burdette. On his seventieth 
 birthday, Mr. Calkins wrote him a letter full of genuine 
 affection and appreciation, and with many tender 
 references to the old days when both were struggling 
 upon a far western newspaper in what was little more 
 than a pioneer community. Of the early Hawk-Eye 
 days Mr. Calkins writes: 
 
 The period Mr. Burdette spent in Burlington, Iowa, as 
 city editor and special correspondent of the Burlington Hawk- 
 Eye, was the period that directed and determined his evolution 
 as a humorist, and the period that brought him a sufficient 
 measure of celebrity to enable him to launch himself as a popu 
 lar lecturer, with a prosperous voyage to a golden success. 
 
 In Peoria he had given a rein more or less free to his bent 
 for humor, but he had only local fame as a funny man. The 
 Hawk-Eye was in need of a city editor; and the business man 
 ager of that paper insisted that what it needed was a man with 
 a mind and soul above police court and local railroad news, 
 and so it came about that Mr. Burdette, a young man then 
 (for that was around forty years ago), was engaged. He came 
 with a contract, which was a thing unusual in those days, and 
 by the terms of that contract he had a sway over his depart 
 ment that was freer than that of any other city editor in all 
 that region. 
 
 There is a story, pleasant to hear and possibly true in some 
 degree, that Mr. Burdette s drift into professional humor 
 followed naturally upon his efforts to beguile the tedious hours 
 of his young invalid wife. She was sorely afflicted with a 
 prostrating malady that finally laid her a helpless cripple, and 
 her sufferings were severe, but patiently and wonderfully 
 endured. 
 
 Her husband, the story goes, endeavored to lighten her 
 gloomy hours by bringing home with him at noon and evening 
 some funny story. There is no difficulty in believing that these 
 anecdotes, personal and fanciful, were amusing; at any rate 
 it is said that Mrs. Burdette enjoyed them, and at length began 
 
 110 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 to urge him to print them, holding that if they could make a 
 sick wife laugh, they should, at least, make the rest of mankind 
 smile; and so, without much persuasion, he began. 
 
 In any event, when he came from Peoria to the sober old 
 Hawk-Eye, which made a business of taking itself so seriously 
 that it was almost painful, he came to smile. Mrs. Burdette s 
 illness grew more and more serious; the treadmill of the 
 "local s" desk was anything but a rosy situation; there was 
 no vision of fame or fortune ahead, and the specter of consum 
 ing suffering sat at his hearth day and night, and financial 
 burdens were heavy, but still he smiled. 
 
 All that Burlington and the rest of the world knew about 
 it was that Mrs. Burdette lived in the midst of anguish, and 
 that he was exceedingly gentle and fond and careful of her, 
 so that, for all her pitiful condition, she was still a happy 
 woman and that the city page of the Hawk-Eye was almost 
 useless as a news letter, but so unprecedentedly interesting 
 that everybody simply had to read it. No matter what the 
 trial at his home, and no matter what great and momentous 
 events might be stirring the little old town to its foundations, 
 there was not very much of anything on the local page of the 
 Hawk-Eye but Bob Burdette s rib-racking nonsense. In all 
 its life the staid old Hawk-Eye had never said so little about 
 the new houses out on North Hill, and the runaways and plain 
 drunks down town, or been so readable or so popular. 
 
 The editor of the Hawk-Eye was Dr. Beardsley, a tall, 
 thin man, gentle and courteous, but with an incurable belief 
 that the chief end of a city editor is to tell all the doings of the 
 town and refrain from all printed mirth as unseemly. Dr. 
 Beardsley had not been the discoverer of Bob Burdette, and 
 he chafed, and fumed, and finally exploded. There was news 
 enough in town, but instead of it the Hawk-Eye was printing 
 only nonsense! 
 
 But the other man, in the business office, had some sub 
 scription figures to show in answer, and that was about all the 
 answer he made, or needed to make. If there was anything 
 the old Hawk-Eye needed it was more subscribers and adver 
 tisers, and for once they were both headed toward it. So Dr. 
 Beardsley returned to the wonted labor of his editorials, and 
 Bob went on writing and printing his genial foolery, and the 
 business continued to come, and all Burlington was happy. 
 
 Ill 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Did anybody on West Hill care that a $40,000 fire was 
 covered in a paragraph? Not so long as there was a mirthful 
 column recounting the adventures of Middlerib. Did South 
 Hill miss a full report of the political rally at South Hill Square? 
 Not if Bob had remembered to adorn a page with the latest 
 adventures of Old Bilderback and Young Bilderback, his mis 
 chievous son. Good Doc. Beardsley, upstairs, might frown, 
 and do even worse, but the habit of taking the Hawk-Eye 
 spread, in a very contagion of risibility, till the subscription 
 list was dizzying, and business fairly boomed in the once quiet 
 old counting room. 
 
 That trait of kindness and gentleness with others must 
 have been elemental in Mr. Burdette s makeup, for in those 
 days, before he had evaporated the enthusiasms of youth, and 
 learned caution by all manner of experience, he was never 
 known to give offense by his jokes. His humor was generally 
 not always, but nearly always impersonal. His funny stories 
 were characteristic, but his characters were fictitious. He 
 made a mock of no man in order to raise a laugh. But on the 
 other hand, the city pages of the Hawk-Eye of those days show 
 more than one obituary sketch so filled with sympathy and 
 tenderness, and so fraught with pathos, that they can hardly 
 be read without moist eyes, though the ink on those musty 
 old pages has been dry these forty years. 
 
 There wasn t a great fund of material for a humorist in 
 Burlington in those days. The people of the little burg of 
 some 15,000 inhabitants were so busy trying to outgrow Chicago 
 and St. Louis that they hadn t thought much about taking 
 time to laugh at anything. But little by little Bob Burdette 
 ferreted out unsuspected sources of smiles. An old cutter, 
 stranded by some thaw, or Hallowe en prank, lingered, summer 
 and winter, by the side street on South Hill, where Mr. Burdette 
 passed it daily. Others saw nothing funny about it, but he 
 made "The Red Sleigh on Maple Street" famous from one end 
 of the land to the other. 
 
 The town had wrung from the Burlington road a concession 
 in the form of a somewhat large and expensive viaduct over its 
 tracks, and then had let it stand there to rot and fall down 
 without ever a soul having set foot upon it, the city finances 
 being unequal to the strain of providing approaches. The 
 
 112 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 Aldermen and the people of Burlington had found the "Sixth 
 Street Bridge" a very serious and perplexing affair, but when 
 Bob Burdette got his bearings he made it a joke, and one that 
 echoed far and wide. An eyesore for years had been a low- 
 lying city block, in the business section. It was subject to 
 overflow, and was tenanted by two or three unkempt squatter 
 families with a plentiful following of dogs, geese and uncared- 
 for children, and rejoiced in the singularly befitting name of 
 Happy Hollow. The police and the board of health and the 
 nice people of the town found this spot a problem and a vexa 
 tion, but it was a mine of genuine treasure to the laughing 
 Hawk-Eye man. 
 
 It wasn t news that Bob Burdette was writing then, but 
 something larger and more valuable. He was unconsciously 
 moulding himself, training himself, and polishing his thoughts 
 and words and phrases into that singularly felicitous perfection 
 which his work of late years all came to show. No other man 
 of all the humorists of this country, big and little, possessed 
 such grace of composition, or such happy conceit of humorous 
 utterance, and these free unfettered days on the Hawk-Eye 
 were the ones that began the substantial moulding and shaping 
 of his great talent. 
 
 Through this period of three or four years the older people 
 of Burlington clearly recall two salient features of their life. 
 One was the morning watch for the Hawk-Eye carrier, who 
 was bringing the latest doings of Bilderback and Middlerib, 
 and the other was the vision of Mrs. Burdette, and her hus 
 band s devoted tenderness. They drove for her benefit, a 
 low-hung phaeton, drawn by a gentle pony. Into this he would 
 lift her slight form, bent and wrenched by her disease, as he 
 would carry and place a baby; and out of it, at the end of the 
 drive, he would lift her again and carry her in. They visited 
 friends this way, and they went to church, and even to some 
 entertainments. 
 
 There was no dramatic pretense about it, no prudery, and 
 no senseless timidity; simply if she went at all she had to be 
 carried, and her husband was the one to carry her. Touching 
 and pathetic was the scene whenever it was enacted, because 
 it was so unaffectedly simple and natural. Mrs. Burdette is 
 still quoted in Burlington as the high mark of a cheerful patience 
 8 113 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 and happy helplessness, which all should emulate, but which 
 only a few of us can attain, and her husband is still the very 
 mould and pattern there of conjugal devotion and care, and 
 with all these, of light-hearted smiles in the midst of stress and 
 tears. 
 
 It takes something of a reputation to endure thus for forty 
 years. To him she was always "Her Little Serene Highness", 
 and there is nothing in the language more moving than his bit 
 of verse after her death; long enough after to dull the sting 
 and ache of the parting and intensify the loneliness. 
 
 The Hawk-Eye came to be read not only within the limits 
 of Burlington and Iowa as in the past, but had its circle of 
 readers in practically every state in the Union. Its circulation 
 increased remarkably, and the outside circulation was due 
 largely to Mr. Burdette s columns. He came to be known as 
 the "Hawk-Eye man". His work included crisp paragraphs 
 touching upon politics and public life, each with its own pecul 
 iar and whimsical coloring; domestic sketches in which exag 
 geration formed the motive, and editorial articles which he 
 wrote in a serious and altogether logical vein, and the Hawk- 
 Eye became not only a source of pleasure for its humorous 
 qualities, but a source of real power in Iowa politics. Ardently 
 Republican himself, and bringing with him from his war 
 experience his belief in the infallibility of Republican policy 
 and principles, it was a genuine delight to him to enunciate 
 that clearly and forcefully through the columns of the 
 Hawk-Eye. 
 
 Then came the plunge into the public eye in the role of 
 lecturer, following these years of preliminary newspaper work. 
 Telling about it afterward, he used to smile reminiscently over 
 the audience of compassionate reporters, and more or less 
 uncomprehending ushers and janitors, who alone attended his 
 maiden lecture, "The Rise and Fall of the Mustache," for it 
 chanced that the whole world did not besiege the box office 
 on that occasion. 
 
 The next appearance was better attended, and success 
 came swiftly. Naturally it would, for in that deliciously humor 
 ous sketch of a human life, its trials and absurdities, and high 
 spots and weaknesses, every normal listener found himself 
 epitomized. The first lecture may not have been generally 
 114 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 accounted a work of genius, but it came very near being all of 
 that. Then came the abandonment of the reporter s pad and 
 pencil for the life of the lecturer; and a very earnest and serious 
 life it was, for all it dealt in smiles. For an ardent homelover 
 like Mr. Burdette, it was a way of thorns, but he accepted 
 midnight accommodation trains, poor hotels, cold halls, strange 
 faces and all the crosses and adversities of a man who travels 
 with a grip and umbrella in one hand and a time card in the 
 other, with the same unchanging smile, and a steadily growing 
 philosophy. 
 
 It was in these days, when he was a lonely wanderer among 
 strangers, that the inner counterpart of the true humorist 
 began to appear, that is the man of pathos. Laughter and 
 tears lie near together, and the man who is really master of the 
 one is generally known by his ability to command the other. 
 Up to this time Mr. Burdette had written little but in lighter 
 vein; indeed, almost nothing at all. Now, however, he began 
 to touch those deeper and more vibrant chords that lie beneath 
 the smiles that we wear on the surface. He had been through 
 sad experiences "waters that are deep and dark and bitter", 
 as he phrased it and the pathos of life and things began to 
 creep into his pen. And the strongest proof of his mastery of 
 the pathetic lay in the fact that he made the most out of the 
 smallest and most ordinary things. 
 
 One time he was adrift among his lecture dates away down 
 in Maine, in which State, probably, a Westerner feels more 
 forlornly lost and astray than he does in any other corner of 
 the Union, and in his loneliness he strolled down among the 
 railroad yards, and there encountered, not an adventure, nor 
 a romance, nor a great piece of philosophy, but a battered 
 old box car that bore the name of the Burlington road, the 
 C. B. Q. It was a homely and hopelessly unsentimental old 
 thing, but it came from home ! It was a dead, insensate embodi 
 ment of a soulless corporation, but it had looked on the same 
 old scenes the Sixth Street bridge, and the old depot, where 
 Mort Haight and Charlie Dunbar and Abe Cleghorn held sway, 
 and the streets where "she" used to drive; and it seemed a 
 living link to the past, and like him, a lonely wanderer. 
 
 The letter that came back to the Hawk-Eye following that 
 night was nothing but a visit with that old box car, but as I 
 
 115 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 read proof on it, I had hard work, indeed, to see through my 
 tears. And that was only one of many such that came to us 
 in the course of those months. 
 
 From those days forward Mr. Burdette steadily 
 and visibly developed. Certain crudities of diction 
 vanished, and increasing graces grew in their stead. 
 He became less and less a mere amuser, and more and 
 more a philosopher. He held to the end the same good 
 cheer, and the same smiling outlook on life, and the 
 same sweet kindliness that forebore in the days of his 
 unphilosophic youth, to make a jest at the cost of any 
 other man, but he brought into those more and more 
 of the pathos of life; more of the real intent of the 
 Creator, who gave him the mystic gift of his divine 
 humor that earnestness should mingle with our smiles 
 and wisdom temper our mirth. He must have lived 
 wisely and wrought well, for in all the town of Burling 
 ton, after he had lived there for years, not a man or 
 woman could ever be found but spoke of him lovingly 
 and cherished, as a treasure, the memory of his 
 acquaintance and friendship. 
 
 For some time, at the beginning of his platform 
 career, Mr. Burdette served the Hawk-Eye as special 
 correspondent; that is, while he wandered to and fro 
 in the filling of his lecture engagements, he wrote two 
 letters a week, which appeared in that paper over his 
 name, and under the caption "Roaming Robert". 
 
 In this series of letters, which was continued two or 
 three years, appeared some of the finest things he ever 
 wrote. Much of it was mere airy persiflage, intended 
 to amuse for the moment, and wholly trivial in its 
 character and still quite inimitable but very much 
 of it was literature, and the kind of literature that 
 people read and then paste away in scrap-books or 
 116 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 treasure in the pages of memory and often mention, 
 with regret at their inability to repeat it. 
 
 This was the product of his brain and pen, in spite 
 of the fact he always declared that he never set out to 
 be "funny" or to be a "funny man", as paragraphers 
 were known at that time. But however solemn his 
 thoughts, he could not resist the appeal of the humorous 
 side of almost everything that surrounded him, and the 
 quirks of his frolicsome pen seemed sometimes to be 
 independent of any intent. His letters then and later 
 show this quick turning from gay to grave and from 
 grave to gay to be one of the odd qualities of his mind, 
 and even in times of his greatest trial and stress his 
 letters revolved rapidly in a circle that included its arc 
 of philosophy, humor, pathos and almost tragedy, and 
 so rapidly the circle revolved, its qualities seemed 
 almost to be blended in one. 
 
 Personally he was joyous and frank, made friends 
 quickly and to those he loved he gave at once apparently 
 to the very depth of his spirit. One of the old printers 
 on the Hawk-Eye said of the instant gripping of his 
 personality, upon first acquaintance: 
 
 We do not know what he said and we do not remember 
 what we replied, but we do know that for the rest of the night 
 we could think of nothing but the pleasant manner and black 
 eyes of the famous writer. 
 
 And with men of genius and distinction in all parts 
 of the country, the reading of the Hawk-Eye and Mr. 
 Burdette s humorous columns was a genuine pleasure. 
 Henry Ward Beecher, whom Mr. Burdette so admired 
 in earlier days, was one of those quick to recognize the 
 genius of the Hawk-Eye man and to acknowledge it 
 with word and pen, and in a letter written while passing 
 through Burlington on one of his lecture trips to the 
 West said: 
 
 117 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Burlington is well placed upon the Mississippi. Whatever 
 may be its future commercial prosperity, nothing can well pre 
 vent its being a delightful place of residence. Who has not 
 heard of the Burlington Hawk-Eye? Before one reads a line 
 he finds himself smiling as with an intuition of mirth in all its 
 quaint, fantastic guises. Mr. Burdette adds to the arduous 
 duties of the editorial chair the amenities of a lecturer, and is 
 much sought for at home. "A prophet is not without honor 
 save among his own countrymen " has no relevancy to him, as 
 he is not a prophet, but a gentleman, an editor and a wit, and 
 is best esteemed where he is most known. 
 
 The friendship of Mr. Beecher and Mr. Burdette 
 began with the early recognition of Mr. Burdette s 
 quality as a humorist, and continued through the 
 years of Mr. Beecher s life. At his death, Mr. Burdette 
 acknowledged his life-long obligation to the great 
 preacher: "In the first years of my lecture work, or 
 rather play/ he said, "his advice and good counsel 
 made smooth many rough places/ 
 
 To quote him, when speaking of Beecher as a 
 humorist: 
 
 "The gravest nations," says Landor, "have been the wit 
 tiest, and in those nations some of the gravest men. In Eng 
 land, Swift and Addison; in Spain, Cervantes. Rabelais and 
 La Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to have been 
 reveurs. Few men have been graver than Pascal; few have 
 been wittier." 
 
 So Henry Ward Beecher s humor was part and fiber of his 
 earnestness. I think he never felt the burden of being "humor 
 ous". He was not rendered preternaturally solemn by the 
 dreadful consciousness that something "funny" was expected 
 of him; and so he never seemed to pump up his jokes or his 
 light, laughter-compelling sayings. If he did for no man 
 knows how much heartache a laugh may hide the pumping 
 was so delicately done by hidden machinery that the stream of 
 his humor flowed as from a perennial fount of unfailing good 
 nature. He did not use his humor merely to create a laugh. 
 
 118 
 
NEWSPAPER CAREER 
 
 It was part of his work part of himself. It was as natural 
 as sunshine, in the social circle, on the platform, or in the pulpit; 
 it was bright, restful, reverent, because of its very earnestness. 
 Behind every laugh, in lecture or sermon, lay some ambushed 
 truth that thrust itself upon you as the laughing skirmishers 
 that lured you to its front passed away. He was a Carlyle 
 man, who "sang at his work, inarching always to music," so 
 that his efforts to be useful were "uniformly joyous, a spirit all 
 sunshine, graceful from very gladness, beautiful because bright." 
 
 It was because his humor was so much an unconscious 
 part of himself that one despairs of reproducing it. The task 
 is difficult, and indeed is in most instances a failure; note the 
 many poor stories already credited to Mr. Beecher by well- 
 meaning narrators who have attempted to translate untrans 
 latable "Beecherisms". Take away the rest of the sermon, 
 take away the company, the circumstances, the time, the argu 
 ment or the conversation that called forth the jest or story 
 take away from it all the preacher himself, and too often you 
 have left Hamlet out of the play. 
 
 Robert Ingersoll was another of his friends of boy 
 hood and of young manhood, and he had always the 
 deepest admiration for the brilliancy and oratorical gen 
 ius of the great agnostic. Ingersoll was a Peorian and a 
 friend of young Burdette not only in his school days, 
 but afterward in his work upon the Transcript and 
 Review, and while in his letters to the Hawk-Eye and 
 in his platform addresses he joined issues frequently 
 with the Ingersollian views and preachments, he was 
 at the same time a student of the Ingersollian method, 
 so far as an expression of his ideas in public speech was 
 concerned, and he kept for many years a copy of one 
 of IngersolPs articles upon oratory, in which the main 
 points were carefully marked, and had been evidently 
 as carefully observed. 
 
 Mr. Burdette s speech, like his writing, was eloquent, 
 possibly the eloquence that had come down from his 
 singing Welsh ancestry. His manuscripts were written 
 
 119 
 
ROBERT J. BTJRDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 usually with ink, and his words flowed freely from his 
 pen, so that his first draft, with few interlineations or 
 erasures, was available either as newspaper or lecture 
 platform "copy". He was a master of adjectives, and 
 his perorations reached always a climax without hesi 
 tation, and while, when it was suggested to him that 
 he lecture, he objected upon the ground that he was 
 not an orator, yet it is true that he had always had a 
 genius for story-telling. 
 
 120 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 A" the time Mr. Burdette turned to the lecture 
 platform it was at the height of its popularity. 
 In the days before the Civil War it had been 
 the means whereby political orators and social 
 propagandists were enabled to present their views. 
 After the war this popularity increased, and its scope 
 was greatly enlarged. Nearly every town of impor 
 tance, and indeed many small towns, had their "star 
 courses", which included lectures of the serious sort by 
 Talmage, Wendell Phillips, Russell Conwell, Beecher, 
 Ingersoll, or one of a great number of lesser lights, 
 programme of music, " impersonations," stories of 
 travel and other features of entertainment. 
 
 Humorous lecturers were not so numerous, and the 
 lecture lists in those days were always carefully labelled 
 "humorist" in a significant parenthesis, for the temper 
 of the people was serious following the Civil War, and 
 the full tide of the reaction toward humor had not yet 
 set in. Henry W. Shaw (Josh Billings) and "Artemus" 
 Ward had appeared with considerable success as lec 
 turers and readers of their own humorous comment. 
 Mark Twain had not yet found the lecture platform 
 sufficiently alluring, although in after years he lectured 
 at occasional intervals. The "Danbury News Man" 
 (J. M. Bailey) made a brief appearance, but did not con 
 tinue the work, and Mr. Burdette was perhaps the first 
 of the newspaper humorists to make an appearance with 
 a lecture, prepared for the times and tastes of the plat 
 form course, that had a continued and consistent vogue. 
 
 121 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 His first lecture announcement ran: 
 
 "Robert J. Burdette, the Humorist of the Bur 
 lington Hawk-Eye, is prepared to make a limited 
 number of engagements to lecture this season, 
 after December 25th, 1876. Terms $50.00. 
 Library Associations, Literary Societies, Lecture 
 Lyceums, etc., can secure this by addressing 
 Robert J. Burdette, Associate Editor, Hawk-Eye, 
 Burlington, Iowa." 
 
 His first appearance was at the little town of 
 Keokuk, in Iowa, in December, 1876, with "The 
 Rise and Fall of the Mustache", which came to be 
 known in practically every state of the Union, and 
 which he delivered nearly five thousand times, so that 
 he said afterward, "It was only necessary to start it 
 and it would say itself." It was the story of the transi 
 tion from the childhood of the boy to his manhood, in 
 its humorous and pathetic phases, as Mr. Burdette s 
 lively imagination saw and pictured them, and he 
 himself gives the account of its first delivery: 
 
 Keokuk I launched my first lecture on the broad ocean 
 of human hearts and ears in December, 1876, in Keokuk. The 
 Baptist church was the generous phalanx that supported me 
 and stood responsible for the lecture. A warm-hearted swarm 
 of Keokuk s best and kindest was the audience. I had about 
 nine and a half pounds of manuscript on the reading desk, I 
 think, and I read it clear through. Never missed a word, 
 didn t leave out a line; took me two hours and fifteen minutes. 
 
 When I got through I hadn t enough voice left to ask for 
 a glass of water, and my throat was so dry I couldn t drink it 
 when I got it. How wretchedly I felt whenever the audience 
 laughed! I thought, "They re laughing at me". Maybe they 
 were. It never occurred to me that I was reading what pur 
 ported to be a humorous lecture. Occasional bursts of applause 
 frightened me. I thought, "Well, now what?" 
 
 When I dared look up, the encouraging countenances of 
 122 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 my audience reassured me and I d pull myself together and 
 read a little louder and a great deal faster. Oh, that was a 
 great big, long, wide, large lecture, it was! 
 
 The record of his first lecture is tersely set down in 
 a memorandum book of his lecture engagements that 
 he prepared toward the end of his platform work, from 
 records of his lecture days, which included the 
 towns in which he had appeared, his several appear 
 ances in each, the organization for which he appeared, 
 the title of the lecture, the humorous stories inter 
 polated, and any incidents he might wish to recall 
 upon the occasion of his re-visitation. In the instance 
 of Keokuk he set the town down characteristically in 
 bold capitals, and he notes specifically his compensa 
 tion, which was one-half of $32.00, the gross receipts 
 for the evening. 
 
 Carefully he preserved everything that pertained to 
 his first formal public appearance, and it is interesting, 
 after this time, to note contemporaneous comment. 
 The Keokuk, Iowa, Gate City, following his first appear 
 ance there, observed that 
 
 Keokuk audiences are not always large, but they are pretty 
 much always critical. The lecturer was introduced by a Dr. 
 Cleaver, and in less than five minutes he fully ingratiated him 
 self into the good graces of the audience. The amount of fun 
 Which he crowded into those five minutes put everybody in 
 excellent humor for what followed. A vein of genuine humor 
 pervaded the entire lecture, and while the grotesque and ludi 
 crous portions of it were capital, the brilliant flights of rhetoric 
 which the lecturer frequently indulged in were not least to be 
 commended by any means. Whatever criticism may be made 
 of the manner of delivery, it must be stated that the matter 
 was excellent throughout. 
 
 And while the last sentence may be a diluted 
 compliment of the Tom Sawyerish variety, without 
 
 123 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 doubt his first audience was honestly in sympathy 
 with him. 
 
 At last Mr. Burdette had found his work, and his 
 eloquence, keen wit, tender humor and pathos equipped 
 him for the lecture platform, a life he followed for more 
 than a quarter of a century. 
 
 That winter he was in much demand from church 
 and other organizations in Iowa and Illinois, and he 
 responded to those demands as much as possible, con 
 sidering his Hawk-Eye duties, and for a small fee. 
 
 It was inevitable that his work should come to the 
 attention of the bureaus, and in the spring of 1877 he 
 had his first overture from Hathaway and Pond of the 
 Redpath Lyceum Bureau, offering him a place upon 
 their list, and the probability of a considerable number 
 of lecture engagements in the West in the fall and winter 
 of 1877 and 1878. That offer he accepted, and it was 
 in that fall and winter that he did his first bureau 
 work. 
 
 His first book was issued in 1877, in response to 
 a demand for the text of his lecture on "The Rise and 
 Fall of the Mustache". It was published by the Bur 
 lington Publishing Company, in which was included 
 Robert J. Burdette, Frank Hatton and his brother, 
 Harry Hatton, J. L. Waite and James Putnam. The 
 latter was the business manager of the publishing 
 company and succeeded in pushing the sales to a con 
 siderable edition, but the expense incident to book 
 publishing by a new and inexperienced company did not 
 make the enterprise especially profitable, as is indi 
 cated in a letter to G. W. Carleton, the New York 
 publisher, written by Mr. Burdette at the time: 
 
 My book is just out. I brought it out myself; Burlington 
 Publishing Company, Robert J. Burdette, President. I 
 124 
 
MR. BURDETTE IN 1877, AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS LECTURE CAREER 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 wouldn t be president of anything again if I lived and died in 
 unofficial obscurity. I wouldn t be President of the United 
 States. I wouldn t publish another book myself if this great 
 living world went down to its grave in ignorance, groping in 
 the darkness for my book, and crying in agonizing tones, " Bring 
 out your book! " I would say, " Book be blowed ! " I am glad 
 my book is out, though. I am glad it is going to make me so 
 wealthy. I am glad I can take part of the money and pay off 
 the national debt; but not on my own account. Ah no. I 
 could stand the national debt three or four years longer. 
 
 The three years from his advent on the platform 
 until 1880 his family remained in Burlington, where he 
 combined his Hawk-Eye and lecture work, spending 
 most of the lecture season upon the road, and the time 
 when he was not thus engaged, in the office of the 
 Hawk-Eye and with his family. These were periods 
 of alternate exaltation and depression. Sensitive to 
 what he felt to be his shortcomings as a public speaker, 
 he was inclined, not infrequently, to think his work a 
 failure. 
 
 A list of the lecturers and entertainers of those days 
 is especially interesting after a lapse of years. It 
 included P. T. Barnum, the showman, Henry Ward 
 Beecher, James G. Elaine, Will Carleton, Schuyler 
 Colfax, Rev. Robert Collyer, Edward Eggleston, the 
 beloved James T. Fields, John B. Gough,the temperance 
 lecturer and one of the veterans of the platform, Julia 
 Ward Howe and Mary A. Livermore. 
 
 Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage was another of the stars 
 of those days. Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras, 
 gave readings of his poems. Thomas Nast, the car 
 toonist, was included as a lecture possibility. Wendell 
 Phillips was one of the bureau s "Big Three ", which 
 included Beecher, Phillips and Gough. Henry W. 
 Shaw ("Josh Billings"), with Burdette, William S. 
 
 125 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Andrews and E. C. Dubois, were included as the 
 humorists of the bureau list. Others listed as readers 
 were Nella F. Brown and Mrs. Laura F. Dainty, one 
 of the most popular of the "elocutionists" of that day, 
 and among the entertainments is included that of Sol 
 Smith Russell and Oliver Optic, in what was listed 
 as "A New Duologue Entertainment". Among the 
 old letters of Mr. Burdette is one from the beloved 
 Sol Smith Russell, afterwards so well and affectionately 
 known as a comedian upon the legitimate stage, asking 
 if the Hawk-Eye man would not prepare him some new 
 and original character sketches for his platform 
 impersonations. 
 
 His engagement with the lecture bureau meant that 
 in the future he would spend most of his time away from 
 the Hawk-Eye sanctum, and while, without question, 
 he regretted the severing of the intimate relations with 
 the Hawk-Eye staff and the people of Burlington that 
 had made his days there a source of continued interest 
 and delight, yet there were many reasons why he felt 
 it his duty to make the change. The returns from his 
 platform work were much greater, naturally, than any 
 newspaper position could pay. The acquaintance to 
 be brought about with thousands of his auditors by the 
 contact of the lecture platform meant a wider circula 
 tion for his published writings, and the work itself he 
 found altogether inspiring and agreeable. 
 
 So after a discussion of the matter with his asso 
 ciates of the Hawk-Eye, it was agreed that his office 
 work should be taken over by others, and he should 
 have his liberty to do his lecture work, it being under 
 stood that he was to write a letter a day to the Hawk- 
 Eye as his fancy might dictate. These letters covered 
 a period of five years. Nearly always he headed them 
 
 126 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 with a limerick and accredited it to well-known authors 
 Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Browning, Julia Ward 
 Howe, and others, and they were so evidently incon 
 gruous that one smiled to think of the daring in the 
 assumption. They included sometimes humorous, 
 sometimes serious descriptions of the towns in which 
 he lectured, of his audiences, his experiences while 
 traveling, and frequent pen pictures of the notables of 
 the time as he encountered them in his travels. Of 
 his letters, the one of greatest general interest was that 
 which contained his "Brakeman at Church". This 
 was a detailed account of an imagined conversation 
 with that functionary of a train upon which he was 
 traveling, in which was set forth his view of the different 
 religious denominations. 
 
 It is probable that no article of newspaper phil 
 osophy and humor written in that, or possibly in any 
 period, has been more times reproduced or has had a 
 wider general circulation. Its popularity was imme 
 diate, and after its publication in the newspaper letter, 
 it was republished by the Hawk-Eye as a pamphlet, 
 and was distributed by tens of thousands. It was 
 copied by practically every newspaper of more than 
 the slightest importance in the country. It was repro 
 duced for advertising purposes by dozens of publishers 
 in pocket memorandum books and had a very wide 
 circulation in this form. It was read from a hundred 
 platforms, and few of the reading public of that gen 
 eration but had an intimate knowledge of the "Brake 
 man at Church". 
 
 The letter in which it first appeared was written 
 from Lebanon, Ind., December 29, 1879, and the 
 article itself is reproduced as perhaps the most generally 
 interesting of his newspaper sketches: 
 
 127 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 LEBANON, IND., Dec. 29th. 
 
 On the road once more, with Lebanon fading away in the 
 distance, the fat passenger drumming idly on the window pane, 
 the cross passenger sound asleep and the tall thin passenger 
 reading " General Grant s Tour Around the World ", and won 
 dering why "Green s August Flower" should be printed above 
 the doors of "A Buddhist Temple in Benares". To me comes 
 the brakeman, and seating himself on the arm of the seat, says: 
 
 " I went to church yesterday." 
 
 "Yes?" I said, with that interested inflection that asks 
 for more. "And what church did you attend?" 
 
 "Which do you guess?" he asked. 
 
 "Some union mission church?" I hazarded. 
 
 " Naw," he said, " I don t like to run on these branch roads 
 very much. I don t often go to church, and when I do, I want 
 to run on the main line, where your run is regular and you go 
 on schedule time and don t have to wait on connections. I 
 don t like to run on a branch. Good enough, but I don t like it. 
 
 " Episcopal? " I guessed. 
 
 "Limited express," he said, "all palace cars and two 
 dollars extra for a seat; fast time and only stop at the big 
 stations. Nice line, but too exhaustive for a brakeman. All 
 train men in uniform, conductor s punch and lantern silver- 
 plated, and no train boys allowed. Then the passengers are 
 allowed to talk back at the conductor, and it makes them too 
 free and easy. No, I couldn t stand the palace cars. Rich 
 road, though. Don t often hear of a receiver being appointed 
 for that line. Some mighty nice people travel on it, too." 
 
 "Universalist?" I suggested. 
 
 "Broad gauge," said the brakeman; "does too much 
 complimentary business. Everybody travels on a pass. Con 
 ductor doesn t get a fare once in fifty miles. Stops at all flag 
 stations and won t run into anything but a union depot. No 
 smoking car on the train. Train orders are rather vague 
 though, and the train men don t get along well with the passen 
 gers. No, I didn t go to the Universalist, though I know some 
 awfully good men who run on that road." 
 
 " Presbyterian? " I asked. 
 
 "Narrow gauge, eh?" said the brakeman, "pretty track, 
 straight as a rule; tunnel right through a mountain rather than 
 128 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 go around it; spirit level grade; passengers have to show their 
 tickets before they get on the train. Mighty strict road, but 
 the cars are a little narrow; have to sit one in a seat and no 
 room in the aisle to dance. Then there s no stop-over tickets 
 allowed; got to go straight through to the station you re 
 ticketed for, or you can t get on at all. When the car s full, 
 no extra coaches; cars built at the shops to hold just so many 
 and nobody else allowed on. But you don t often hear of an 
 accident on that road. It s run right up to the rules." 
 
 "Maybe you joined the Free Thinkers," I said. 
 
 "Scrub road," said the brakeman, "dirt road-bed and no 
 ballast; no time card and no train despatcher. All trains run 
 wild and every engineer makes his own time, just as he pleases. 
 Smoke if you want to; kind of a go-as-you-please road. Too 
 many side tracks, and every switch wide open all the time, 
 with the switchman sound asleep and the target lamp dead out. 
 Get on as you please and get off when you want to. Don t 
 have to show your tickets, and the conductor isn t expected to 
 do anything but amuse the passengers. No, sir, I was offered 
 a pass, but I don t like the line. I don t like to travel on a 
 road that has no terminus. Do you know, sir, I asked a divi 
 sion superintendent where that road run to, and he said he 
 hoped to die if he knew. 
 
 " I asked him if the general superintendent could tell me, 
 and he said he didn t believe they had a general superintendent, 
 and if they had, he didn t know anything more about the road 
 than the passengers. I asked him who he reported to and he 
 said nobody . I asked a conductor who he got his orders 
 from, and he said he didn t take orders from any living man or 
 dead ghost. And when I asked the engineer who he got his 
 orders from, he said he d like to see anybody give him orders, 
 he d run that train to suit himself or he d run it into the ditch. 
 
 "Now you see, sir, I m a railroad man, and I don t care to 
 run on a road that has no time, makes no connections, runs 
 nowhere and has no superintendent. It may be all right, but 
 I ve railroaded too long to understand it." 
 
 " Did you try the Methodist? " I said. 
 
 "Now you re shouting," he said with some enthusiasm. 
 
 "Nice road, eh?" 
 
 "Fast time and plenty of passengers. Engines carry a 
 
 power of steam, and don t you forget it; steam gauge shows a 
 
 9 129 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 hundred and enough all the time. Lively road ; when the con 
 ductor shouts all aboard you can hear him to the next station. 
 Every train lamp shines like a headlight. Stop-over checks 
 given on all through tickets; passenger can drop off the train 
 as often as he likes, do the station two or three days, and hop 
 on the next revival train that comes thundering along. Good, 
 whole-souled, companionable conductors; ain t a road in the 
 country where the passengers feel more at home. No passes; 
 every passenger pays full traffic rates for his ticket. Wesleyan- 
 house air brake on all trains, too; pretty safe road, but I didn t 
 ride over it yesterday." 
 
 "Maybe you went to the Congregational church?" I said. 
 
 "Popular road," said the brakeman, "an old road too; 
 one of the very oldest in this country. Good road bed and 
 comfortable cars. Well managed road, too; directors don t 
 interfere with division superintendent and train orders. Road s 
 mighty popular, but it s pretty independent too. See, didn t 
 one of the division superintendents down east discontinue one 
 of the oldest stations on this line two or three years ago? But 
 it is a mighty pleasant road to travel on. Always has such a 
 splendid class of passengers." 
 
 "Perhaps you tried the Baptist?" I guessed once more. 
 
 "Ah, ha!" said the brakeman, "she s a daisy, isn t she? 
 River road; beautiful curves; sweep around anything to keep 
 close to the river, but it s all steel rail and rock ballast, single 
 track all the way and not a side track from the round house to 
 the terminus. Takes heaps of water to run it through ; double 
 tanks at every station, and there isn t an engine in the shops 
 that can pull a pound or run a mile with less than two gauges. 
 But it runs through a lovely country; these river roads always 
 do; river on one side and hills on the other, and it s a steady 
 climb up the grade all the way till the run ends where the foun- 
 tainhead of the river begins. Yes, sir, I ll take the river road 
 every time for a lovely trip, sure connections and good time, 
 and no prairie dust blowing in at the windows. And yesterday 
 when the conductor came around for the tickets with a little 
 basket punch, I didn t ask him to pass me, but I paid my fare 
 like a little man twenty-five cents for an hour s run and a 
 little concert by the passengers throwed in. I tell you, Pilgrim, 
 
 you take the river road when you want " 
 
 130 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 But just here the long whistle from the engine announced 
 a station and the brakeman hurried to the door, shouting: 
 
 "Zionsville! This train makes no stops between here and 
 Indianapolis !" 
 
 The pictures of his contemporaries as he found 
 them in his travels were interesting. Of an early New 
 England trip he writes from Boston, in December of 
 1879: 
 
 Reached here in the morning and went to Tremont House. 
 Delightfully old-fashioned rooms. Bathroom about the size 
 of a drygoods box. Waiters appear to have been born in the 
 house. Weather villainous; composed principally of east wind. 
 Met a chilling reception at the bureau. Major Pond found me 
 and made me feel at home. A splendid big-hearted fellow. 
 Took tea with himself and wife, a handsome young lady, and a 
 famous vocalist, Miss Isabel Stone. Heard Cook and Beecher 
 lecture. Liked Joseph (Cook) much better than I expected I 
 would. Lectured in Tremont Temple myself Dec. 4. Audience 
 not more intelligent than, and not half as appreciative as most 
 Western audiences. Might have been my own fault, but I 
 was disappointed, all the same. 
 
 And a few days later he writes from New Bedford, 
 Mass. : 
 
 A rousing big house, the best, in point of intelligence and 
 good humor, I have faced this year. Entertained by E. C. 
 Milliken, old-fashioned old people, from Maine. Met two 
 sons and one daughter-in-law. Younger son, Frank D., a 
 lawyer, just appointed Justice. Massachusetts legal contempt 
 for Indiana reports not considered authority. Jolly reception 
 in the Pleasant Street M. E. Church after the lecture. 
 
 This picture of Boston people as he saw them is 
 interesting: 
 
 The first thing that strikes a western man when he lands 
 in Boston, is the wonderful reserve of the people here. He 
 sits down in utter desolation as he misses the cordiality and 
 
 131 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 frankness and heartiness of western society. The Bostonian 
 is not gruff; he is not supercilious; he is not impolite. He 
 could not be more courteously attentive to the wants of the 
 stranger; but his courtesy never runs to "gush". I stopped a 
 man on the street yesterday to ask the way to a certain locality. 
 He looked at his watch and hesitated a moment. "I can t 
 direct you so that you could find it, if you are a stranger," he 
 said; and in spite of my feeble protestations, he turned back 
 and went with me, and I saw him, when he left me, again glance 
 at his watch and walk away at a gait that indicated a feverish 
 desire to make up for lost time. If he kept up that gait he is 
 in San Francisco this morning. 
 
 It is a very simple incident, but it illustrates one phase of 
 Boston character very plainly. He wasn t at all sociable or 
 conversational during our ten minutes walk, not a bit of it. 
 Now, out west, we would have shaken hands with the puzzled 
 stranger, slapped him on the back, called him "old boy", 
 directed him as far as he could follow our instructions intelli 
 gently, and then told him when he got to that corner, anybody 
 would tell him the rest of the way. 
 
 One doesn t get intimately and accurately acquainted with 
 the motives and inner life of a community in three days, but 
 I have found the people I have met here to be the most delight 
 ful of acquaintances as this reserve, that at first freezes the 
 western man, wears away. While this reserve, I think, is a 
 general characteristic of Boston people, it isn t universal. This 
 afternoon Major Pond took me down to the greatest publish 
 ing house in this country, and within five minutes Mr. Houghton 
 and Mr. Osgood made me think I was back in Burlington, and 
 I instinctively looked out of the window to see what the South 
 Hill woman was doing for tomorrow morning s Hawk-Eye. 
 
 This is the picture of him as the Boston Globe saw 
 him at the time of his appearance: 
 
 A square-shouldered man, who is too large to be called 
 diminutive, and too small to be ranked with people of average 
 size, tiptoed in from a side door and stole bashfully across the 
 stage at the B. Y. M. C. A. building while the president was 
 speaking last evening. He took a seat at one end of the stage 
 132 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 and doubled his legs up under him and tried to conceal his left 
 hand by placing his right one over it. Finding this impossible, 
 he reversed the process with no better result. 
 
 The 400 or 500 people present looked at him and applauded, 
 for which compliment he bowed, and then made another 
 attempt to conceal his hands. A round, strong face, with a 
 look that might be cynical if it were not toned down with pleas 
 antness, dark eyes, stowed safely away under over-hanging 
 brows, a well-arched mouth, surmounted by a moustache that 
 showed symptoms of good care and waxing, and a heavy 
 growth of brown hair parted on the right side, and rolling over 
 his left ear in a fluffy bunch that amounted almost to a coil, 
 completed a picture that was not bad to look upon. 
 
 In a letter written en route in the West he wrote: 
 
 On the way to Lincoln it was my good fortune to meet 
 Frances Willard on the train. She is lecturing on this side 
 of the Missouri River, and her efforts in the great work on home 
 protection are meeting everywhere with encouraging success. 
 She is a woman who cannot be easily discouraged, under any 
 circumstances; she has fought a good fight, and fought it 
 bravely, and her devotion to the cause with which her name is 
 so thoroughly identified, has developed and strengthened all 
 the womanly qualities which so eminently fit her for this work. 
 
 She is a brilliant, entertaining conversationalist, and how 
 well she talked about Grant and the turned glasses at his 
 place at the banquet table. Certainly it was a grand thing for 
 him to do. Grander than pounding Vicksburg into dust and 
 submission; grander than the terrible victories of the Wilder 
 ness; grander even than standing on the neck of humbled and 
 crushed rebellion at Appomattox; it was the grandest of all 
 victories, the victory over self, for "he that ruleth his spirit is 
 better than he that taketh a city". 
 
 And the man who saved the republic has perhaps no idea 
 of the great good his example in the house of feasting has 
 wrought among the men, and especially the young men, who 
 admire Grant. In more than one instance this spring, have I 
 heard this action quoted by some young fellow at a banquet 
 table, as he turned his glass, "in imitation", he would say, 
 "of Grant". And I think it is the brightest leaf in the great 
 
 133 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 soldier s laurels; the fairest deed of the man who saved the 
 republic. 
 
 This paragraph occurs in a New York letter: 
 
 Into the parlor car at Salamanca comes a tall man, with 
 gray hair, a white beard and a gray mustache; there is a merry 
 twinkle in the kindly eyes, a world of cordiality in the strong 
 grip of the big hand, and a steady flow of quiet drollery and 
 rare good sense and honest philosophy in the sentences that 
 drop from the heavily bearded lips. 
 
 It is Mr. Shaw, whom the world knows better, it may be, 
 as "Josh Billings". "I am sixty-three years old," he said to 
 me, and I could scarcely believe it. He may have lived sixty- 
 three years, but he is younger today than the boys who have 
 learned to read from his "Allminax". He has lectured eighty- 
 six nights this season, and he wants to go home, if the lecture 
 association will let him. I watched him get off the train at 
 Meadville, I saw the committee swallow him up in their em 
 braces, and I thought what a happy crowd there was going 
 to be at Meadville that night. 
 
 Of Eugene Field, in a letter written from Kansas 
 City about 1880, he says: 
 
 There are few Press Clubs in the Republic that can, like 
 that of Kansas City, supply its rooms with its own music, vocal, 
 instrumental and chin, and that too of a high order of musical 
 excellence. Eugene Field is, as his thousands of readers and 
 admirers would naturally suppose, the life of this liveliest of 
 fraternities another Barnabee, and had he chosen the stage 
 instead of the broader and higher field of journalism, he would 
 have adorned and honored it. 
 
 Many were the references he made in his "Roaming 
 Robert" letters to Bill Nye, but his real valuation of 
 him was written at the time of his death in February, 
 1896: 
 
 Edgar Wilson Nye so long has his name evoked laughter 
 that a smile unconsciously plays over the lips of the listener 
 when he is told that the Jester lies dead in his home. 
 134 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 To a few of his friends was accorded the privilege of enter 
 ing into the chambers of his heart, sacred to things deeper and 
 dearer than mirth. Most men required of him mirth, and, 
 true to his mission, his work of making the hearts of men lighter, 
 he laughed with them, and made merry for them, whether his 
 own heart was heavy or light. But, if one would permit him, 
 he gave glimpses of the still, tender depths in his life, of the 
 thoughtful, sympathetic, loving side of his character. And 
 thus, reading between the lines of all that he wrote, having 
 had this insight into the heart of the real, true man, deep 
 respect and sincere love for the man mingled with your laughing 
 admiration for the genius of the humorist. 
 
 One day when the shadows of sorrow had drifted across 
 my own home, there came to me a letter from Nye. A long 
 letter; tender and sympathetic; tear-blistered as though the 
 face of a woman had bent above it; strong and sweet in its 
 consolations it came sobbing from the heart of the real Edgar 
 Wilson Nye. Years ago that was, but ever since that day, 
 whenever I have read him, I have seen the man behind the 
 humorist; through the laughing mask of the Jester I have 
 looked down into the tender, earnest heart, and I have known 
 what it was that sweetened all his humor so that we laughed 
 with the spirit of it, and no one winced or quivered under any 
 sting from it. 
 
 God give him rest and peace. So many heavy hearts he 
 has made light; so many dark hours he has brightened; so 
 many cares he has laughed away from other lives; so much 
 of wearisome toil he has cheered with his laughter surely his 
 epitaph will be written in sunbeams, and his rest must be in a 
 shadowless land, where men wear no masks, because there are 
 no troubled hearts to hide. 
 
 His first visit with Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) 
 was at the home of the great humorist at Hartford: 
 
 The pleasantest view I had of the city was from the cosy 
 fireside in that wonderful home of Mr. S. L. Clemens, who was 
 my host during my stay in Hartford. 
 
 I think I have never been in a home more beautifully home 
 like than this palace of the king of humorists. The surroundings 
 of the house are beautiful, and its quaint architecture, broad 
 
 135 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 East Indian porticos, the Greek patterns in mosaic in the dark- 
 red brick walls, attract and charm the attention and good taste 
 of the passerby, for the home, inside and out, is the perfection 
 of exquisite taste and harmony. But with all its architectural 
 beauty and originality, the elegance of its interior finish and 
 decorations, the greatest charm about the house is the atmos 
 phere of " homelikeness " that pervades it. 
 
 His admiration for Clemens increased with his 
 years. They maintained an occasional correspondence, 
 and he preserved among his papers the following letter 
 touching the subject of plagiarism, a subject of interest 
 to all authors, in which Mr. Clemens gives his unique, 
 and at the same time sane, view: 
 MY DEAR BURDETTE: 
 
 You will have to ask me another. It is reasonably certain 
 that the man stole the idea from me, but I do not remember 
 now who I stole it from, and so you cannot properly crush those 
 people who have groveled you until we have got all of the sta 
 tistics together. Necessarily the idea was not original with me; 
 I never had an original idea in my life, and never have met 
 anybody that had had (it ain t right yet, but it is righter than 
 it was, I reckon). Nothing is ours but our language, our 
 phrasing. If a man takes that from me (knowingly, purposely) 
 he is a thief. If he takes it unconsciously snaking it out of 
 some old secluded corner of his memory, and mistaking it for 
 a new birth instead of a mummy he is no thief, and no man 
 has a case against him. 
 
 Unconscious appropriation is utterly common; it is not 
 plagiarism and is no crime; but conscious appropriation, i. e., 
 plagiarism, is as rare as parricide. Of course there are plagiarists 
 in the world I am not disputing that but bless you, they are 
 few and far between. These notions of mine are not guesses; 
 they are the outcome of twenty years of thought and observa 
 tion upon this subject. 
 
 Religiously Mr. Burdette sought to keep a daily 
 record of his activities while on the lecture platform, 
 and religiously, as he admitted to himself, he failed to 
 
 136 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 make it consecutive, so that his diaries for the years 
 of his platform activity abound with open spaces. The 
 first record in his own words of his impressions while 
 on the platform appears in his diary for 1881. On a 
 western trip, which covered Illinois, Wisconsin, Mich 
 igan and Ohio, which latter state he always held to be 
 one of the best for the lecturer in those palmy days of 
 the Lyceum course, he did keep a consistent record 
 while on the platform of the places at which he spoke, 
 the lecture delivered, the stories and illustrations used, 
 all indicated by a cipher of his own, by which, upon his 
 return to any place, he was able to consult his record 
 and discover just what lecture and just what illustra 
 tions he had used before. 
 
 It was his custom to confide his impressions to ink 
 and paper, and many are the natural human bits that 
 he has set down, and he set down also in nearly every 
 case his impressions of the particular audience to which 
 he was speaking. With some audiences he was 
 delighted, with others disappointed, admitting always 
 that perhaps the disappointment was due to him as 
 much as to the audience, and in some cases he insisted 
 that he "did not know whether he liked this particular 
 audience or not". And he was to learn, as many 
 another public speaker, that audiences are likely to 
 be as temperamental as artists, as is evidenced by this 
 comment: 
 
 Audiences are just as different as individuals. You never 
 can tell, by your audience last night, what your audience 
 tonight will be like, nor yet the one tomorrow night. You 
 naturally expect, if you have an alleged humorous lecture, that 
 you will have a good-natured audience. But it doesn t follow. 
 Last night you had a house that was one continuous ripple of 
 merriment, that infected you with its own gayety, and made 
 
 137 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 your talk easy for yourself, kept you up to your work, and now 
 and then, so to speak, carried you clear off your feet. To 
 morrow night you may stand before a house that would make 
 an iceberg shiver; cold, lifeless, heavy, and you must work like 
 a Trojan to thaw it out. Maybe you succeed. Maybe you 
 don t. Generally, if there is any life or originality in yourself 
 you do. 
 
 Then, sometimes, you find an audience, intelligent, bright 
 enough, willing to be amused, apparently, but to your dismay 
 you can t get along with them. They are not stupid or cold, 
 but they don t just like you. It is the worst of all audiences 
 to deal with. It is so provokingly disappointing. It promised 
 so much and yields so little. It receives you so warmly and 
 heartily, and then refuses to come any further with you. 
 
 You can t have revenge on such an audience. You can t 
 even feel angry with it. You are only woefully disappointed. 
 
 Then there is another audience. The mean, stupid audi 
 ence. It doesn t hiss you, but you wish it would. It doesn t 
 intend to like you from the start. It just goes to the hall for 
 the purpose of being as mean and mulish as it can. And it 
 does it. It is a very rare audience. Lecturers meet with it 
 very seldom, but a man s experience on the rostrum would be 
 incomplete if he did not have at least one dose of it. 
 
 If you are a big man, a physical giant and a mental Hercules 
 like Mr. Beecher or Colonel Ingersoll, you fight such an audi 
 ence and pound it into goodness and appreciation. But if you 
 are a light weight, if you are just a little fellow, with a little 
 funny lecture, you get mad. You pause long enough to men 
 tally remark to your audience, "Well, I ll bet you a thousand 
 dollars you can t hate me half so much as I hate you," and then, 
 feeling amply revenged, you go on with your chatter. 
 
 But of one audience he wrote: 
 
 I could both see and feel the change of sentiment in the 
 audience. First thing I noticed was the change of position 
 a restless shifting in the chairs people who were lolling in 
 absolute lazy indifference, sitting up shoulders straightening 
 head rising little looks of surprise in the faces. Then the 
 fellows in dead opposition women and men unbending a 
 little the two opposite poles coming together. Then the 
 138 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 closing of the circuit the electric spark and the explosion! 
 As soon as I saw them beginning to sit up and lean towards me 
 I knew I had em, and I put on a forced draft that sent the 
 blue steam hissing out of the cylinders where you d have 
 thought there were no joints! 
 
 Not only the audience before the footlights made its 
 impression on him, but incidents behind the footlights 
 as well. 
 
 Concerning stage setting he wrote: 
 
 A great big house crowded full of people, all in their best 
 clothes and loveliest manner. If I had had arms as long as a 
 wire fence I would have hugged that audience. They were 
 just determined that I should have a good Thanksgiving day. 
 Why, the young fellow who set the stage and he is an artist 
 had gone to no end of trouble and ingenuity to make a picture 
 of that stage that was just too charming for anything. That 
 stage added fifty per cent to the lecture. Every now and then, 
 when I strike a hall man who thinks any stage is good enough 
 for a lecture, and sends me out before a well dressed and intelli 
 gent audience, and makes me talk in a minstrel kitchen scene, 
 with a flitch of bacon and a smoked jowl hanging against the 
 wall behind me, and a candle stuck in a bottle on the mantel 
 piece, and the plastering all broken from the walls, I think of 
 that stage in the opera house at Terre Haute, and wish the 
 manager would send the young artist who set it, around this 
 country on a missionary tour among other hall men. 
 
 Travel by rail in those days was not the matter of 
 luxury and comfort it is today. Trains were few, con 
 nections bad, and many a weary hour was spent in the 
 cold and storm waiting at a junction for a delayed train, 
 or making his pilgrimage by the "way freight". 
 The discipline of his war training, and the health he 
 brought out of it, stood him in good stead in these try 
 ing circumstances, where cold, exposure, irregular meals 
 and other hardships would have put a less vigorous 
 man upon his back in the hospital. He himself 
 
 139 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 suffered enough through his throat, which, all his life, 
 gave him concern, and not infrequently necessitated 
 the omission of a lecture and medical treatment in the 
 interval. 
 
 It was his joy always to find among his audience 
 persons whom he had known in the boyhood days at 
 Peoria. For instance, an entry in his diary from 
 Kalamazoo, Mich.: 
 
 My dear old teacher, the only one I ever loved, A. D. Fitch, 
 lives here, and he introduced me. 
 
 It is probable, however, that his disposition to 
 idealize that with which he had been thrown in affec 
 tionate contact, colored his statement here, for cer 
 tainly in his after years he evidenced the greatest 
 affection for his beloved Ephraim Hinman. 
 
 Sometimes too he found it possible, without a too 
 great injury to his conscientious devotion to duty, to 
 "miss" a town. In January, 1881, he says: 
 
 I just naturally did not get to Lansing by 24 hours. Missed 
 it awfully. Am sorry, but I am never very anxious to lecture 
 in a State capital. Too many politicians, and your average 
 politician does not attend lectures. He is a bird of prey and 
 attends caucuses. 
 
 "A scattered audience " was his bete noir, because 
 he said it was impossible to talk either seriously or 
 humorously to that kind of a gathering, and on one 
 occasion when an audience was distinctly "scattered", 
 he invited them into a corner, where an old-fashioned 
 wood stove blazed, and sitting among them, he deliv 
 ered what was half a lecture and half a fireside discourse. 
 He was quick to see the humorous side of every incident 
 of his lecture life. In one case he says: 
 
 140 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 A good old sister in the audience filled me full of messages 
 to her friends and relatives in Burlington, Vermont, and then 
 was angry because I did not live there, but in Burlington, Iowa. 
 
 His lectures were not set, but elastic, and the length 
 of them depended upon many circumstances. In one 
 little Ohio town he says: 
 
 I talked two and one-half hours, because it rained so hard 
 the people would not go out of the hall. 
 
 New England railroad connections in those days 
 were fearful and wonderful to him, and in speaking of 
 his failure to reach a New Hampshire village, his diary 
 shows this entry: 
 
 To meet the connections of the fearful and wonderful New 
 England system of railroads, it was necessary that I should 
 drive from Bath to Brunswick after a lecture, nine miles of 
 miserable roads. I did not do it. I have had enough experi 
 ence with New England drivers to last me through the season, 
 so I drove to bed and let Lisbon drive ahead without me. 
 Sorry, but I cannot always drive all night to make up for rail 
 road deficiencies. 
 
 Echoes in a lecture hall or church were one of his 
 pet abominations. An Ohio church he refers to as "a 
 beautiful church, very large, and containing 7,216 
 echoes." 
 
 The after-lecture visitations, to which in nearly 
 every town he was subjected, were things he dreaded, 
 although he was apparently very joyous and good 
 natured with those who came to help him while away 
 the midnight hour. On some occasions, however, he 
 deliberately shut himself away, because, as he said in 
 one entry, "I am too tired to talk more than eighteen 
 hours a day/ 
 
 Once he wrote in late May: 
 
 141 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 I am tired to death. I have talked about six nights 
 every week, ever since the 9th of January; I have sat up until 
 one or two o clock A. M. entertaining people after the lecture, 
 and then been called for 6 o clock trains; I have visited 32 coal 
 mines, inspected 53 coke ovens, gone through 67 iron works, 
 visited 93 schools, admired 118 handsome churches, gorged 
 myself at 120 banquets, walked through 173 wagon shops and 
 29 pump factories; walked up and down and up and down the 
 long streets of 198 towns and admired everything I saw; I 
 have climbed eighty-six endless hills to gaze at eighty-six views 
 that " Bayard Taylor said, when he was here, was far superior 
 to anything he saw in Europe"; I have taken my nose in my 
 hand and lounged through two gove factories, five tanneries 
 and three fertilizer works; three weeks ago, I lectured Saturday 
 night, sat up and talked with friends until two A. M., got up to 
 a seven o clock breakfast, went to church with friends at 10.30 
 A. M. lunched with some other friends at 12; went to Sabbath 
 school at 2; sat in the Bible class and made a nice little speech 
 to the children, dined with some other friends at 5, attended 
 evening service at 7.30, went to a friend s house after service, 
 and when we broke up at 11.30 because I had to take a train at 
 4.15 A. M., a good old brother shook my hand warmly and said, 
 " Well, well, we s all glad to have met you. And you ve had a 
 good long rest here with us and you ll feel fresh for your week s 
 work. ..." 
 
 I don t complain a bit. All the people I have met are lovely 
 and lovable people, and they do their best to make me have a 
 good time, but seven good times a week for six months is too 
 much for one man to stand. 
 
 That he remained so long in favor with the lecture 
 bureau was due in no small degree to his determination 
 to keep engagements no matter what it cost him in 
 personal effort or money. I have known him to spend 
 $125.00 for a special train to meet a $100.00 engage 
 ment. 
 
 The strenuousness of lecture travel is indicated by 
 running comment in one of his letters home during a 
 lecture trip, in which he says: 
 142 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 Then at last we got off at Granville. Wrote you about a 
 sudden change of time at Bucyrus. Hired a team, drove thir 
 teen miles to Galion. Got there in time to catch 3.08 train 
 for Columbus. 
 
 It had been taken off! November is the month in which 
 the roads change to their winter arrangement, you know. 
 Hired a special on the "Big 4" engine and coach to take us 
 to Columbus $75. Got to Columbus on time. Train on 
 B. & 0. for Newark had changed time! Left a half hour later 
 than the schedule said. Got supper. Got train at 6.30 P. M. 
 Got to Newark at 7.30. Trolley to Granville eight miles. 
 Got there 8.10. Dressed. Shaved. Audience waiting. On 
 platform at 8.30. Storm of applause. Committee had read 
 my telegrams to them, and explained how hard I was trying to 
 get there. Biggest audience Granville ever sent out to a lec 
 ture. Great success. Nearly $100 taken at door as extra sales. 
 
 Chas. L. Williams and wife (Upland) wanted me to go 
 home with them, but couldn t that night. Went to chapel in 
 the morning. Talked; conducted chapel service. (Denison 
 University.) Went to Williamses. Called on Purintons. 
 Dinner at W/s, manager and self. Now en route for Marlette. 
 
 His diaries are filled with intimate and humorous 
 reflections touching men and things, and he seemed to 
 be particularly joyous when he could set down some 
 thing in the nature of a joke upon himself. Thus in 
 one instance: 
 
 Got here at noon. Pleasant weather. Pleasant boarding- 
 house hotel. Parlor and bedroom with wood stove. When 
 I opened my valise, left dress suit trousers at home. Horror! 
 Bought a pair for $4.50. Legs seven inches too long. Had 
 them fixed. Wore em. All right. Don t just match coat 
 and vest, but dress suit trousers cost $16.00. 
 
 And again: 
 
 Got to bed about 1 A. M. with the pleasant prospect of 
 sleeping till 9 if I wanted to. Later wanted to. 
 
 There are also numerous impressions of his close 
 and beloved personal friends, to meet whom repeatedly 
 
 143 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 was one of the joys of his platform life. An entry from 
 Peoria, Kan., reads: 
 
 Dined with Wm. A. White of the Emporia Gazette, and his 
 business manager, Mr. Smucker, a Pennsylvanian. White s 
 wife was away from home in Topeka, and his mother presided 
 over the feast. He is a very engaging fellow, with the pleasant 
 habit of laughing at a thing at broken intervals a long time 
 after it has been said. It is pleasant in him. It would be 
 horrible if it were imitated. Good thing for a sketch. 
 
 Of Noble Prentiss he writes: 
 
 Always an inspiration when in my audience, and he re 
 mained three delightful hours with me at Kansas City telling 
 stories. 
 
 Hotels were different in those days, and at Paola, 
 Kan., he notes: 
 
 Hotel delightfully old-fashioned. Landlord Grimston 
 carves and serves at his table. Everything was delightfully 
 home like. 
 
 At Rockwell City, Iowa, he writes of 
 
 , the attorney who insists on remembering me most inti 
 mately when I lived in Osceola, Iowa. As I never lived there 
 I tried to discourage him, but it was no good, so I finally remem 
 bered him as the oldest and dearest friend of my boyhood. 
 
 Writing from an Ohio town, he makes this comment: 
 
 The Baptist preacher said he had been offered double the 
 salary he was getting, and all his expenses, to go with a show 
 as an advance agent. I thought, after hearing him preach, 
 that it was his solemn duty to go. 
 
 And after being " entertained" at a private home 
 by delightful friends who kept him up until after the 
 midnight hour, when he was exhausted from a hard 
 day s travel and a long lecture, he wrote of the following 
 morning: 
 144 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE OF THE "ROAMING ROBERT" LETTERS 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 Dragged myself out of bed, wishing I had lied about some 
 mysterious engagement and gone away at midnight. Wish I 
 had run away at midnight anyhow. Couldn t. Overcoat 
 downstairs and valise too heavy to drop out of the window. 
 
 Of a train visitor who insisted upon whiling away 
 the hours of travel, his diary shows this entry: 
 
 She whiled away the hours to Kansas City with sprightly 
 converse. My ears were cold and swollen and numb when we 
 got there. I thought that once or twice death would come to 
 my release, but he sent his excuses. He said he knew the party. 
 
 It was his custom, too, on his travels, to seek 
 wherever he could find material for his newspaper 
 work, and frequently he found this in an unusual way. 
 Writing in the winter of 1890, he says: 
 
 Went out for a long walk after breakfast. Dropped in on 
 a little United Brethren Church, attracted by the loudest 
 preaching I have heard for a long time. (Preacher a young 
 man.) After service we all walked through the snow and the 
 woods to the river, where, amid the floating ice, one old woman, 
 three young women, three little girls and one little boy were 
 baptized, after the U. B. form, the candidates kneeling in the 
 water and being immersed face forward three times. The 
 young minister was in the icy water twenty-eight minutes. 
 
 His old army comrades were always a source of 
 inspiration to him, and in an Ohio village 
 
 came down from Castalia as usual. Camp fire of course, 
 
 and a good deal of the night consumed in the same old army 
 
 talk. Long letter from , who wants a pension because he 
 
 fell off his horse, and another from an old comrade who wants 
 one because his horse fell on him, all of which proves that men 
 ought to learn to ride before they go into the army. 
 
 In a Pennsylvania village he had an experience, 
 which is thus noted: 
 
 Lectured in Presbyterian Church, new and very handsome. 
 
 Some opposition to a "funny lecture" in it. Good sister came 
 
 10 145 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 down in the afternoon and moved the pulpit away lest I should 
 desecrate it, so the pulpit is all right. Did not hurt me, so I 
 am all right. 
 
 After some dozen years on the lecture platform, he 
 reviews the hardships on the road in his own inimitable 
 way: 
 
 The lecturer is a cricket who sings merrily during the winter, 
 while the greedy ant, virtuous little prig, is gorging itself with 
 the dried flies and grasshopper legs and cracker crumbs amassed 
 by incessant toil all summer, and stored away in the ground for 
 winter use. How much better is it to play all winter and loaf 
 all summer! Let us see how much "fun" the ant misses by 
 not being a cricket. 
 
 It is a model winter morning at a model country station. 
 The committee that met the lecturer at the noon train the day 
 preceding, took his valise, escorted him to the carriage by each 
 elbow, and followed him to his room to see that the chair was 
 there, and the bed, and the towel, and the block of galvanized 
 soap, does not turn out to see him off on the train that is due 
 to leave at 4.30 A. M. in bleak December. I admire the com 
 mittee for its display of excellent judgment. I, too, lift up 
 my voice against the early train of incense-breathing morn. 
 The world doesn t look right in the dim gray light of super- 
 early dawn. It turns round too fast, and in the cold and cheer 
 less winter time it is enough to make a man with the spirit of 
 a martyr tired. All its angles stick out; its friendships, which 
 were eternal at 10.30 P. M., are hollow mockeries when the red- 
 faced sun is lazily yawning his way out of bed. The lamps 
 that burned with a mellow glow, with song and mirth in their 
 radiance when the night was young, sputter and smoke and 
 smell bad when the rosy-fingered hours take their places for 
 the Daylight Gallop. 
 
 Patience is set on a hair trigger, ready to go off at a touch. 
 There is no bus for the train, and the porter doesn t go to meet 
 it. You carry your own valise, and as you stumble and grope 
 your way along the unlighted street, through new-laid drifts 
 of beautiful snow, you resolve for the hundredth time that 
 when this season is over you wouldn t lecture again for a hun- 
 146 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 dred dollars a minute. And when the cricket runs over a saw- 
 buck and gets tangled up in a buggy wheel and a broken sleigh- 
 runner in front of the wagon shop, and discovers forty yards 
 farther on that he has lost one overshoe in the scuffle, he sighs 
 with envy as he thinks of the industrious ant, calmly dreaming 
 the happy hours away in his little granary, ready to eat his 
 blankets as soon as he awakes without the trouble of lighting 
 a fire or putting on the kettle, while he prudently saves his 
 mattress for dinner, when he may have company. 
 
 At the station, the operator at the telegraph table is pale 
 and tired, and so jaded with his night-long vigil that he has lost 
 all power of speech and can only feebly articulate "I d no" to 
 all questions, and you believe him. You will believe anything 
 at that unearthly hour, unless it be something reasonable. 
 The fire is low-spirited, and when it is not watched makes 
 desperate efforts to commit suicide by freezing itself to death. 
 The room is cold, and so dark that no one can see the pro 
 hibitory sign "No smoking", and if their attention is called 
 to it, they sniff contemptuously, and smoke "nigger-head" 
 tobacco in original packages, in ancient and loud-scented pipes 
 that would poison the deadly upas-tree. The train is late, and 
 when the operator gets tired saying "I d no", he slams his 
 little wicket in our faces, and stony despair settles down upon 
 every heart. The sun gets up high enough to look into the 
 dismal waiting room, and with a perceptible shudder pulls a 
 great black cloud over his head, as though he had made up his 
 mind not to get up until the day was farther advanced and a 
 little warmer. Only one man comes into the room who isn t 
 cross as a janitor. He is smiling, merry, and sunny-tempered, 
 with a cheery word of greeting that ought to melt the heart of 
 an iceberg. The only effect it has on the crowd of sullen, half- 
 frozen passengers is to create the impression that he has been 
 drinking. The icy glares which fall upon the missionary of 
 sunshine from every face soon worry him into silence and glum- 
 ness, and before the train comes along we manage to make him 
 the Grossest man in the herd, and he sasses a minister of the 
 gospel and snubs a sweet young lady with a red nose and a 
 music roll. 
 
 The train comes jolting along at last. The cars are some 
 what colder than the waiting room, but they are in motion. 
 
 147 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 It reaches the dining station, and everybody except the lecturer 
 has twenty minutes for breakfast. The train he is to take at 
 this junction has been waiting forty-five minutes for the one 
 he is on, and "pulls out" right away. He then looks at the 
 crowd of passengers thronging into the dining room, whence 
 issues a fragrant incense of steaming coffee and juicy steak, 
 and thanking heaven quite audibly that he is not a glutton, 
 as other men are, climbs wearily on the Whoa, Haw and Gee 
 train to fast and meditate. When the train boy comes along, 
 he asks him if he has any sandwiches. He has "all the latest 
 popular novels, choice bound-books, Harper s for December, 
 Century, Frank Leslie s, Ladies Home Journal, Puckcwm the 
 Judge". All good, but none edible. However, he manages to 
 find in a dark corner of his box some Smyrna figs, taken from 
 the haversacks of Egyptian mummies who are supposed to 
 have died of starvation while pursuing the Israelites figs were 
 so old then the soldiers couldn t eat em and these relics of a 
 lost age keep life in the lecturer s body and revive hope in his 
 heart. "Where do we dine, conductor?" "At Corduroy 
 crossing, 2.35 p. M." Hope shrieks feebly and skips the ranch, 
 because the lecturer changes cars at Poplar Bridge, at 11.47 
 A. M., fifty miles this side of Corduroy. 
 
 A numbness falls upon his frame, and sleep, sweet angel, 
 comes to steep his senses in oblivion, but before she can score, 
 the "talking man" comes along and sits down by his side, 
 "to pass the time". He could pass eternity just as easily. He 
 begins by telling his private affairs and family business to a 
 man whom he never saw before in all his life. I never yet got 
 on a train that I didn t hear somebody s family history. This 
 man tells about a trip he once made to Europe; began with a 
 letter he got from his uncle asking him to go with him; told 
 all about the business which called his uncle to Europe, and 
 some of the business was of such a character that if it had been 
 my uncle, I would have lied about it, and said it was my brother 
 Ben s uncle, and I have no brother Ben; but no; this man 
 told me all about it; what he thought when he got the letter, 
 how he happened to go to the post office that morning, what he 
 said to the clerk, and what the clerk said to him; who the clerk 
 was; how he came to marry a second time, and who his sister 
 married; wondered if I knew his sister s husband, and when I 
 
 148 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 said I didn t, he said he reckoned not; told the street he lived 
 on and why he never wore a stiff hat; where he used to live 
 and why he moved; who lived in his old house now, the sort 
 of people they were and why he didn t like them; why he 
 thought his wife didn t really quite appreciate him, and why 
 he thought she was too cold and took too little interest in his 
 business. Much more information than this would have been 
 poured into my sleepy ears had we not reached Poplar Bridge 
 just before I died. 
 
 That s all there is at Poplar Bridge just the bridge and 
 another railroad. The train comes along after three o clock; 
 and the lecturer has time to go to a farm house about a mile 
 away and dine with a voracity that frightens the children. 
 The weather moderates; it grows warmer until it begins to 
 rain and puts road, street, and sidewalk in beautiful condition 
 for a lecture night, snow, slush, slop, and rain. The horrible 
 weather detains the train. At 7.45 the lecturer reaches his 
 station, and is met by a heart-broken, despondent committee, 
 who tell him they have had just this sort of weather for every 
 lecture in the course with the exception of the night Colonel 
 Sawpit was to lecture on the Battle of Bunkerloo, with stereop- 
 ticon illustrations. That was the loveliest night of the winter; 
 clear as a bell, full moon, good sleighing, special train from 
 Grigsby station, hall jammed to the doors, and reserved seats 
 sold clean up into the gallery; and about half -past eight o clock 
 a telegram came saying the colonel had missed connection at 
 Poplar Bridge and couldn t get through. 
 
 With this cheerful greeting the lecturer climbs into the 
 crowded bus, gets to the hotel, shaves himself, dresses, and is 
 in the hall tired, dejected, and supperless in twenty minutes. 
 The scanty audience feels the dispiriting influence of the weather 
 and empty benches. Nobody wants to laugh; the members of 
 the lecture association are especially downcast; the hall man, 
 anxious lest he may not get his rent, and wisely determining to 
 lose as little as possible, saves on his gas, and glooms the light 
 in the hall down to the dim religious glimmer of a tallow-candle 
 illumination. The chairman, in his dejection, forgets his intro 
 ductory speech, and gets the lecturer s name wrong. Ordinarily 
 this is a happy thing, because it makes the people laugh at the 
 chairman and puts them into a good humor; but on this kind 
 
 149 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 of night everybody resents it; the women look scornful and the 
 men frown, and the prominent citizen, who thinks (and tells 
 you in confidence that everybody else thinks) that he should 
 have been asked to introduce the speaker, makes audible and 
 sarcastic comment on the "bad break", saying that "old 
 Newelpost couldn t tell his own name if it wasn t printed on 
 the programme". 
 
 The lecturer rises, smiling without an effort there is 
 something irresistibly comical in the spectacle of a dispirited 
 audience, thinly scattered about a gloomy hall, grimly listening 
 to a humorous lecture. He postpones his opening pleasantries 
 there s never any hurry about "jokes" and when he has 
 soothed the audience as you would coax a balky horse into 
 forgetfulness of his worry or perplexity, he lets off the first 
 joke. It is damp, like everything else, and is an utter failure. 
 The next one falls flat as a presentation speech. The one after 
 that is drawn a little too fine, and excites only bewilderment. 
 A few more skirmishing jests are sacrificed on the clammy altars 
 of an "off night", and the lecturer begins to realize that unless 
 something is done very speedily and very successfully, the battle 
 is lost. He abandons the lecture for a moment and tells a 
 story. As a rule, people like to hear stories when they won t 
 listen to anything else. The story is too old or too new, too 
 long or too pointless, or something, and people look tired and 
 scornful. 
 
 Then he returns to his lecture and calls up his reserves. 
 He hurries to the front an old veteran, a joke that has rarely 
 failed, save on nights that from the beginning of time were 
 fore-ordained to gloomy disaster, and hurls it upon the invinci 
 ble phalanx of set lips and frowning brows before him. Vain 
 hope! The Old Guard recoils; the glittering joke of a hundred 
 nights of light and revelry spreads its bright pinions in the 
 smoky glare of the flickering footlights, which flame "no light, 
 but only darkness visible," and then, lost in the fog and cold 
 and general dejection, falls into the slough of despond to 
 flounder to a martyr s death. 
 
 "0 dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, 
 Irrevocably dark, total eclipse, 
 Without all hope of day. 
 
 150 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 "Of comfort no man speaks; 
 Let s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs." 
 
 Unlaughed at, unmourned, unremembered, save by its 
 sorrowing parent, the brightest joke of all the sunny flock is 
 lost in the common doom. Woe, then, be to the lecturer who 
 reads, and has to wade on through his manuscript clear to the 
 far-away end. The man who talks knows that his lecture is 
 ended then and there. He goes on, to fill up a certain length 
 of time, but he makes the time to suit the temper of his audi 
 ence, and so his lecture is two hours short or fifty minutes long, 
 as the case may be. He tells no more jokes on the Waterloo 
 night. He moralizes, philosophizes, speaks "sarkastical", and 
 tells stories, but his lecture is a funeral oration over his own 
 failure, and that pleases the audience better, under the circum 
 stances, than anything else. When a man is tired, and cold, 
 and damp, and cross, and didn t want to come to the lecture 
 anyhow, but was fairly dragged there by his wife, who was 
 tired of being in the house all day, he doesn t want to be pleased ; 
 it is his humor to be cross and disagreeable, and the crosser 
 you can make him feel the better he likes it, until, paradoxical 
 as it may appear, he sometimes fairly scolds himself into a 
 good humor. 
 
 If a man talks long enough and patiently enough, half- 
 past nine or ten o clock will come around some time the same 
 night. It is Saturday night, too, and he is buoyed up by the 
 blessed hope of a Sabbath of rest, for it has been a busy week, 
 with every day full of long trips and every night full of lecture. 
 He finally bows himself off the platform, followed by a feeble 
 sputter of applause which testifies the general joy at the hour 
 of release. The chairman detains the impatient audience long 
 enough to announce that the speaker of the evening, having 
 decided to remain in town for his Sunday rest, has kindly con 
 sented to preach in the First Baptist Church tomorrow morning 
 at 10.30, and will also address the young men at the meeting 
 of the Young Men s Christian Association at four o clock in 
 the afternoon, and will preach in the Zion Methodist Episcopal 
 Church at 7.30 in the evening. The audience then escapes; 
 the lecturer learns that there is no place open at that hour 
 where he can get supper, whereupon he placidly lies and smil- 
 
 151 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 ingly says he isn t hungry anyhow; a few friends, remarking 
 that they don t suppose he can go to sleep immediately after 
 lecturing, attend him to his room in the hotel, which they fill 
 with tobacco smoke, while they encourage him to tell stories 
 and give recitations until twelve o clock, when the approach of 
 Sunday morning breaks up the party. The lecturer crawls into 
 bed, honestly hoping as he groans his way under the blankets 
 that he may never awaken again if once he can get to sleep, 
 which impious aspiration is rudely negatived by the youngest 
 man in the party, who comes thundering at his door next morn 
 ing, at 7 o clock, bright as a lark, bringing a couple of autograph 
 albums and a cigar six inches long, stronger than the memory 
 of a wasted life; and what s more, he is a little hurt if the lec 
 turer declines to sit up in bed right away and smoke it to the 
 bitter end, which is both ends. He gets through the services 
 of the "Rest Day", half a dozen strangers are invited to meet 
 him at dinner, as many more at tea, after the evening service 
 he is taken to call for "just a few minutes" upon "a most 
 influential and charming family", that didn t find time to 
 attend any one of his four or five public appearances, and at 
 last he gets to bed, taking enough time from his evening prayers 
 to write to his Lecture Bureau that next season the fee for that 
 town is to be $250, with $50 extra for an afterpiece. 
 
 This is the "shady side" of lecturing, and it is no exagger 
 ation. In fact, the hardest trips have not been drawn on for 
 this sketch, as any lecturer can testify. I have known a lec 
 turer to take a train immediately after his entertainment, ride 
 all night, changing cars twice, with never a ghost of a chance 
 for a sleeper, ride all next day, part of the time on a freight 
 train, reach the lecture point at 8 P. M., go from the train to the 
 hall, grimy, unshaven, supperless, faint with fatigue, giddy with 
 fasting and loss of sleep, and then take a train at eleven o clock 
 the same night for "anywhere" just to avoid a "reception", 
 because somebody would get mad if he stayed in town and 
 declined it. There is lots of "fun" in humorous lecturing, 
 but the lecturer doesn t have all of it himself. 
 
 While lecturing had its difficult side and its hard 
 ships, it had, as well, its element of growth and develop 
 ment, both more rapid than possibly Mr. Burdette him- 
 152 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 self realized. Continued and intimate contact with 
 humanity ripened and developed his naturally sympa 
 thetic and affectionate nature. In the early years of 
 his newspaper work his humor was buoyant, jubilant 
 and effervescent. Indeed, he himself admits that the 
 humorous phase of every subject had its instant appeal 
 to his fancy, but with travel, deeper experience and 
 his intimate sorrow, came a more serious and reflective 
 period in his life and work. He came to look upon 
 humor as a means and not as an end, and he began to 
 see that it was his mission to make people cheerful and 
 to make hearts tender and sympathetic, rather than 
 merely to bring the laugh to the lips of the unthinking. 
 
 The three books which he said gave him the 
 foundation for this more serious work, were the Bible, 
 Shakespeare and Pilgrim s Progress, and he was equally 
 familiar with each. Each he had read and re-read 
 until he quoted copiously and at will. 
 
 His first lecture was followed quickly by two others, 
 "Home" and "The Pilgrimage of the Funny Man". 
 This third lecture was a humorous and philosophical 
 reflection upon his own observations of people. A quo 
 tation from it shows the broadening effect of human 
 contact, and shows also his adaptation in many in 
 stances of the style of Bunyan: 
 
 Now it did not all go well with the Funny Man in his 
 pilgrimage. Some of the sorrow in the world seemed to be 
 infectious. Some of the wickedness in it certainly was. With 
 varying fortunes and changing incidents he traveled on until 
 he came to the most dangerous point in all his pilgrimage, and 
 entered upon the Bad Lands, where for a time, he lay in the 
 house of one Conceit, who filled his mind with evil counsels. 
 He had been laughed at so often, that he had grown to think 
 whatever he said was funny, and that all things were food for 
 his humor and sarcasm. 
 
 153 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 He lost reverence for things that all good men revere. 
 He went past the house of mourning with laughter on his lips, 
 and he jested while the hearse stood at his neighbor s door; he 
 laughed at sacred things, even while there were tears in his 
 own heart, because now he laughed and jested not because his 
 heart was light or because he wanted to make the world brighter 
 and men happier, but because he wanted men to laugh at him. 
 
 He forgot that the mission of laughter is beyond himself, 
 is grander and better than self; that the man who cannot 
 sway as with the breath of a god, the listening, still breathed 
 multitudes by the sweeping whirlwind of resistless eloquence, 
 who cannot, with the brain of genius and an arm of iron, save 
 a sinking state; who cannot thrill the world with the sublimest 
 strains of deathless song; whose lips have not been touched 
 with the incense of poetic fire, if he can yet be an humble priest 
 at the altars of Momus, and can waken the chambers of the 
 heart with laughter, and wreathe its altars with smiles, has 
 still a work to do that is honest enough to demand that he be 
 true to it, and manly and Christian in it. 
 
 In these Bad Lands, with their poisonous and infected 
 atmosphere, the poor Funny Man, weak and flattered, forgot 
 there are things in this world he must not laugh at; he forgot, 
 when the temptation came to him to say a mean thing instead 
 of a funny one, and no one but himself knows how often this 
 temptation comes to him, that it is not funny to stab one man 
 to make a dozen others laugh. So often he yields to this 
 temptation, and then at night, alone, in the solemn darkness, 
 the climbing blushes mantle his cheeks and burn his forehead, 
 when the cruel, mean, pitiful, bitter joke comes to him like a 
 spectre, and he sees there is a sneer on its shriveled lips instead 
 of a smile. 
 
 Wandering to and fro in these Bad Lands, he forgot, poor, 
 unhappy, cynical pilgrim, that we may laugh at almost every 
 thing else if we will, but sorrow is sacred. We may laugh at 
 this man s creed and that man s superstition, but there is the 
 one grand, broad religion of humanity that uncovers the heads 
 of believer and scoffer alike, and fills the heart with holy rever 
 ence. He forgot that when dark-robed Sorrow lays her white 
 hand on our brother s heart, with the same sacred touch it 
 hushes the thoughtless laughter on our lips. 
 
 154 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 When he laughed at death, he forgot that the lowliest grave 
 that was ever moulded over a pine coffin in the Potter s field, 
 shut in some hope, and love, and clinging tenderness, with its 
 rayless gloom, and shut out some tears to fall with the chilling 
 rain that dripped upon its mouldering clods; some sighs to 
 mingle with the wailing winds that crept with ghostly whispers 
 through the dank grass rustling about it; some loneliness to 
 wander in the great black night that shut the sunlight from it. 
 
 One day he stopped to rest and take notes in a house he 
 had often described but never entered. The wretched cottage 
 where the gate drags out a miserable existence on one leather 
 hinge. Where the hat of last summer does duty in the window 
 of this winter. The house where the woman with the wart on 
 her nose and the strockly red hair cooks liver and onions for 
 the man with the hare-lip and a crooked eye. 
 
 Now it was so that the Funny Man went in and sat him 
 down, and waited for the man to come home, that he might 
 see her smite him with the rolling pin and comb his hair with 
 the gridiron, as he had often told about when he made merry 
 with his friends by the way. But when the man came home 
 that night, with more smut on his face than his wife had freckles 
 on her face, and his legs so crooked you would think he had to 
 have his trousers cut by a grape vine or a corkscrew, there was 
 no show for a fight, and the Funny Man was a little disappointed 
 and very much ashamed of himself, when the ugly man threw 
 his dusty coat on the dusty floor, and walked up to the ugly 
 woman and bent over and looked down at the baby in her lap. 
 
 The baby! Prince of the household ! The little wondering 
 blue-eyed baby, with the dainty little fingers reaching out 
 after everything, and the flossy white hair standing around the 
 restless little head like a halo. The baby! That makes more 
 laughter in the world, purer, sweeter, better laughter than the 
 Funny Man can ever hope to rival. The baby, that laughs at 
 its mother because she is so beautiful and at its father because 
 he is so homely, and at its uncle because his breath is so short, 
 and at its aunt because her teeth won t stay in. 
 
 Baby! Kings have bowed to it, and Postmaster General 
 Key has walked the floor with 13 of them. Not all at once, 
 however. Baby; that laughs when the angel kisses it, and 
 smiles in its sleep when the colic is coming on strong. Baby; 
 
 155 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 the little white-robed dot that wakes with crowing and laughter 
 in the morning and coos itself to sleep at night. Baby, that 
 makes your heart bigger and better and purer for the touch of 
 its warm, dewy lips, and the soft embrace of the dimpled 
 clinging arms. Baby, that makes you laugh every time you 
 look at it, until 
 
 But that night the Pilgrim noticed that the wondering 
 eyes had a tired look in them as they lay half closed. The 
 restless little head, crowned with the silken meshes of the 
 flossy hair, lay still, or rocked from side to side with plaintive 
 moans. The wee white hands had clasped themselves around 
 the hard, rough, grimy fingers of the man, as though no hand 
 in all the world so soft as his. The tired blue eyes, looked up 
 for rest and sleep, into the loving faces over it. The parted 
 lips, with quivering entreaty, in tremulous wails, that pierced 
 the heart with anguish, told in their helpless accents, what they 
 could not speak. How long and how silently they bent above the 
 helpless little form; how every pleading look of the blue eyes 
 burnt into their souls. How deep the quiet of the still soft 
 summer night fell on the cottage, like a pall. 
 
 The heavy hours drag on, but the tired arms that all day 
 long wrought at the murky forge, still wind themselves around 
 the little white-robed figure as though their giant strength 
 could hold it back from death. The speechless pain looks 
 out of the baby eyes. The soft moans and the plaintive wails 
 die away in a fluttering sigh. The silky tangled hair is damp, 
 a shadow deeper than the summer night steals across the baby 
 face, the quivering lips wreathe themselves in a faint smile of 
 relief, the tired eyes close, the wee, white baby fingers loose 
 their clinging hold 
 
 And the Funny Man learns there is something in this world 
 too deeply nestled in the human heart for laughter to reach. 
 And he rises and turns to go on in his pilgrimage, and when 
 Sorrow, she of the melting heart and tender face, has stooped 
 and clasped his hand, like his good Angel, she leads him away 
 from the Bad Lands forever. And he never laughs again when 
 the hearse is standing at his neighbor s door. 
 
 Into his writings at this time began to appear the 
 tenderer and deeper philosophy of living, often masked 
 156 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 slightly with humor, but always carrying a lesson of 
 wholesomeness and sympathy, and in his letters and 
 newspaper contributions we find those paragraphs 
 beginning "My Son", each carrying its appeal to the 
 young. This was indeed the beginning of his disposi 
 tion to "preach", but he was successful in avoiding the 
 appearance of dry moralizing and sermonizing. 
 
 In his fourth lecture on "Advice to a Young Man", 
 which he addressed to "My Son", speaking of the 
 power of innate leadership, he used an illustration 
 which all old soldiers love to recall. Perhaps this par 
 ticular one loses more than any other in presenting 
 only the wording of the story, for into it he always 
 threw his best gift of oratory, his peculiar inflections 
 of voice and the swinging movement of arms and head 
 that some will recall with a certain joy. But I give it 
 here because its very words will bring back to memory 
 some of those embellishments and recall the glory of 
 the peroration. 
 
 One day an officer rode down the lines. He wore a yacht 
 ing shirt, and a jaunty little straw hat sat on the side of his 
 head. He was a general. The golden stars on the broad 
 collar of the garment that fitted his form so well told his rank. 
 His hair hung in loose ringlets down his back. Today I would 
 have called him a dude. The word was not used then. I felt 
 that if that man ever got mixed up in a fight his conduct would 
 cause consternation in the ranks. 
 
 By and by a time came when we were to cross a marsh and 
 river. The enemy were on the other side and the fire from their 
 guns drove us back time and again from the slender bridge. 
 Then a detachment was ordered to go further down and cross 
 in the swamp. The cavalry mounted. We rode through the 
 reeds and bog, across the shallow, though difficult stream, 
 scrambled up the farther bank, and stopped in the tall reeds 
 waist high. There all that long afternoon we waited and 
 waited. The winds moved the vegetation around us. Afar 
 
 157 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 off the random fire of muskets told us as well as if we saw it 
 what was going on. It became more rapid, then louder and 
 nearer. Occasionally a cheer went up. We knew what that 
 meant a sortie for a hedge or a stone wall by some gallant 
 fellows. And finally the rumble and roll of a continued fire, 
 punctuated by the artillery. We were ordered to mount and 
 prepare for a charge. 
 
 I saw that long-haired leader. I felt that some one ought 
 to catch him and be prepared to carry him off the field as soon 
 as we got in the fight. I was ready to do it myself. I had 
 nothing else to do. Now, over us the bombs began to burst, 
 then came the order to ride. At the front of the column, his 
 sword cutting bright flashes in the air as it circled over his head, 
 rode the leader, cheering us on, and not a man were he a 
 coward two minutes before that was not wildly glad to ride 
 that day behind Custer. 
 
 The mere listing of some of the titles of his lectures 
 will recall to mind fragments of the sayings of this 
 "Physician of the Merry Heart ": 
 
 "The Rise and Fall of the Mustache/ 
 
 "Home/ 
 
 "Pilgrimage of a Funny Man/ 
 
 "Wild Gourds/ 
 
 "Woman with the Broom," 
 
 "Dimity Government," 
 
 "Sawing Wood," 
 
 "Twice Told Tale," 
 
 "Handles," 
 
 "Rainbow Chasers." 
 
 Wishing to give one more expression of his gospel 
 of the merry heart, where all his other lectures, under 
 various titles, had preached the same sweet doctrine 
 to the human heart, he wrote and delivered in 1912 a 
 rather fragmentary lecture on " The Laughing Animal " : 
 
 Nothing else in the world of animate and inanimate nature 
 laughs save only man. Laughter is a human monopoly. The 
 158 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 sense of humor, the faculty of laughter is man s exclusive 
 possession. There is nothing laughable in nature. The 
 mountain is majestic; the canon is grand; the sea is impres 
 sive; the meadov/s are beautiful; the desert is lonely; the 
 lava beds are desolate. But nothing in nature is "funny". 
 There is no funny landscape. 
 
 Because laughter is an attribute of the noblest animal in 
 creation, when we desire to compliment nature in the highest 
 terms, we attribute to certain of her moods this exclusively 
 human faculty. We say "the meadow smiles in the sunshine". 
 And that is a compliment. Because a "smile" enhances the 
 most radiant beauty. 
 
 Every woman in this house, no matter how wondrously 
 beautiful she may be, is just a little bit prettier when she smiles. 
 There, you have just proved it! I saw the charming transfor 
 mation in every one of you. Listen to this description of an 
 April day, and see how all the landscape is changed and beau 
 tified with a smile 
 
 The children with the streamlets sing, 
 
 When April stops at last her weeping, 
 And every happy, growing thing, 
 
 Laughs like a babe just roused from sleeping. 
 
 Isn t that delicious winsome charming? It takes a brand 
 new grandfather to appreciate that. And all the transformation 
 is made by the little suggestion of human laughter. . . . 
 
 Laughter the eyes are the windows of the face and the 
 heart "the oriel windows of the soul". But they are dark 
 unless laughter illuminates them. Then we look at the sud 
 denly awakened face and say, "Why, somebody lives in there!" 
 That is right. The soul is at home and has come to the win 
 dow with her candle. The whole countenance is changed like 
 the front of the house. It doesn t light up the house to have 
 two or three ornamental cluster lights in front of it. That is all 
 outside. That reflects back from the windows. But the tiny 
 candle inside ah, that shines through them! That makes 
 the house alive. There is joy and love and hope, and maybe 
 sorrow and pain in that house. It is a human habitation. 
 Nothing so transforms the countenance as a smile. An animal 
 can t do that. 
 
 159 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Life could be sustained on tasteless foods and it could be 
 lived by the cold light of reason alone. But God has given us 
 perfumes and rainbows and orchards sweet with apple blooms 
 and orange blossoms, just as he has given love and joy and hope 
 and music and laughter, to ease and steady our weary feet 
 across the burning marl on the hard days of the pilgrimage. 
 Let us then every day thank God for the joy of living, and 
 laugh a happy little prayer to Him in the morning and smile 
 our thanksgiving up through starlight at the evening time. 
 Fill our mouths with laughter. 
 
 Though the popularity of the lecture platform 
 waned, he remained a "drawing card" always, as shown 
 by a letter to a friend, in December, 1897: 
 
 The season has been a busy one with me. In all my 
 twenty-one years on the platform I never had such houses. 
 Night after night they have seated the stage, packed the stand 
 ing room, and then turned people away. It s great business. 
 
 And what was true in 1897 was equally true in 1912, 
 and all this in spite of what one friend described as 
 
 a thin piping voice and when in the midst of an eloquent or 
 humorous sentence he would swing his hands in front of him 
 like an athlete about to compete in the high jump in the Olympic 
 games. 
 
 Because of his voice he "never accepted any invita 
 tion to speak under the boundless canopy of heaven". 
 His reply to an invitation to speak at a Harvest Home 
 of a Baptist Social Union was 
 
 If the exercises are held in the church, I will come; if they 
 are in the open air, I will send my blessing. If they are sort 
 of mixed, a little one way and some of the other, well then I 
 will fall into harmony with the occasion that is to say, maybe 
 I will come, and maybe I won t. Yours, one way or the other, 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 While it was true that as a lecturer he had many 
 idiosyncrasies, his voice and his manner on the rostrum 
 
 160 
 
LECTURE PLATFORM 
 
 would attract attention anywhere. It was not only 
 what he said, but his manner of saying it that sum 
 moned smiles or tears, as he sought to master his 
 audience and drive home a bit of hidden philosophy. 
 He was never at a loss for a word to express himself 
 and "a golconda of language poured out like a moun 
 tain torrent". He was not unconscious of his power, 
 but he never abused it. However, he always felt that 
 Fate had played a singular trick when it decreed that 
 he should earn his daily bread "at least the crust of 
 it" by appearing before an audience for their approval 
 when he was "short of stature" (being only five feet 
 three inches in height), "a little bent-legged feller" 
 (the army life spent on a horse during his formative 
 years having left that mark), and "lacking training as 
 a speaker". He summarized it: "No voice, no pres 
 ence, no gestures and little hair". But the irresistible 
 smile, the twinkle in the eye, and the quaint humor 
 made one forget the physical defects in the expression 
 of the Merry Heart. 
 
 The pathos of this merry making was expressed in 
 a letter home at the close of one of his lecture seasons: 
 
 . . . Home to Robinsnest; home to you; home to my own 
 work; to the old den and the long silent Remington; to pick 
 up the interrupted threads of life and its welcome duties, and 
 to pick up the dropped stitch, and see how plain we can weave 
 the fabric on thro to the end of the warp and woof. So many 
 dropped stitches I have had to pick up in this broken, faulty, 
 knotty life of mine. So many mistakes I have made in pattern 
 and color; so many times I have let my eyes wander from the 
 pattern and my hands drop from the loom. That s the trouble 
 with this life of ours, dear; it isn t a Jacquard loom it doesn t 
 work automatically from a set pattern. . . . 
 
 "His boys", as he was accustomed to refer to the 
 
 young people, to whom he talked at every opportunity 
 
 11 161 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 in churches and in schools and colleges, were one of his 
 chief sources of inspiration and delight. His addresses 
 to them were intimate, friendly, full of rippling humor, 
 but always with a basis of sound ethics, clean morals 
 and wholesome philosophy, all the more effective for 
 the unique manner in which they were presented. 
 
 The affection of young people for him was tender 
 and abiding. In a letter written to invite him to attend 
 a college class reunion some twenty-five years after he 
 had addressed them, there is this paragraph: 
 
 There will be a hundred men at that banquet who would 
 walk four miles with pebbles in their shoes to hear you talk. 
 My mind dwells particularly upon your kindness one time when 
 I wrote a lecture entitled "That Bad Boy", and asked you to 
 look it over, and, if you could, say something good about it. 
 You were then famous, with a following everywhere. I shall 
 never forget the kind letter you wrote me and the beautiful 
 words of praise you gave my modest effort. Perhaps you did 
 not know then how much good you were doing a struggling 
 boy just out of college, but somewhere above, with a capital A, 
 I know there was written that day in the great white book the 
 credit that still stands. More than a quarter of a century 
 has gone since then, but the memory of your kindness is sweet 
 and fragrant and will be with me till we have both passed 
 beyond the need of earthly love and care. 
 
 That letter was written by Winthrop E. Scarritt, 
 an attorney of New York City, and is typical of thou 
 sands that Mr. Burdette received in the course of his 
 lifetime, each one breathing its message of affection 
 ate recollection and gratitude. 
 
 162 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 HIS closest literary friendship was that with 
 James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet, 
 and it endured during the lifetime of both of 
 them. Mr. Burdette s appearance upon the 
 lecture platform preceded that of Mr. Riley by a short 
 period, and the older man was quick to notice and make 
 note of the genius of the younger. Mr. Burdette had 
 already " arrived ", so far as recognition and popularity 
 were concerned. Mr. Riley was still struggling for the 
 recognition that came to him so abundantly in the after 
 years. 
 
 Their first personal meeting, according to Mr. Bur 
 dette s recollections, was at the home of Mr. Charles 
 Philips, an editor at Kokomo, Indiana, and immediately 
 there was established a bond of friendship and sympathy 
 between them. Hitherto, they had known each other 
 only through their published sketches. An indication 
 of Mr. Riley s earliest familiarity with the works of 
 Mr. Burdette is found in a letter written from Indian 
 apolis, when Riley was with the Journal. Mr. Burdette 
 had included in a letter to the Hawk-Eye an enthusiastic 
 appreciation of Riley and his work, to which the Hoosier 
 poet made his acknowledgment: 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS, Jan. 9, 1880. 
 
 DEAR MAN: Don t want to clog your time, but must hold 
 you with my glittering pen long enough to thank you for your 
 kindly mention of me in your Spencer letter. It was a good 
 thing to say, and a mighty good way you said it. Years ago 
 I said a good thing about you. You never knew it, perhaps, 
 
 163 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 for it was when the soul o me had been out high-lonesomin , 
 and run up against your own out there in Peoria, I imagine, 
 about the time your good wife was so wisely foreshadowing the 
 blessed future that has collared you yea, even as I write. 
 Well, what I said about you started out like this: 
 
 " Twas a funny little fellow 
 
 Of the very purest type 
 For he had a heart as mellow 
 
 As an apple over-ripe; 
 And the brightest little twinkle 
 
 When a funny thing occurred, 
 And the lightest little tinkle 
 
 Of a laugh you ever heard." 
 
 And ended (just as it will end in some glorious dawn, I pray) 
 like this: 
 
 "And I think the angels knew him, 
 
 And had gathered to await 
 His coming, and run to him 
 
 Through the widely-opened gate 
 With their faces gleaming sunny 
 
 For his laughter-loving sake, 
 And thinking, What a funny 
 Little angel he will make! " 
 
 You have done me a world of good, and for you, in return, 
 I could run my legs off clean to the hilt, and holler God bless 
 you every jump. And now with every intense pang of grati 
 tude, and throe of incandescent thankfulness, believe me, I am, 
 
 Yours exactly, 
 
 J. W. RILEY. 
 
 I enclose the stuff I threatened to afflict you with. If you ever 
 worry through em, tell me what you think. 
 
 J. W. R. 
 
 Mr. Burdette never missed an opportunity both 
 by spoken or written word, to call the attention of the 
 public, and particularly of lecture bureau committees, 
 to Mr. Riley s evident quality. Indeed, an old letter- 
 164 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 head of Mr. Riley s, used by him in the early 80 s, 
 includes at the top the text of a flattering notice from 
 Mr. Burdette, and a letter written by him to a plat 
 form committee about the same time says: 
 
 I know Mr. Riley as a journalist, poet and lecturer, and 
 I want you to hear him so that you may admire him as much 
 as I do. I endorse him as I would a man at the bank. He is 
 pure gold. I stand pledged to redeem my endorsement, for 
 he is undoubtedly a grand fellow. 
 
 Their correspondence began following the personal 
 meeting at Kokomo, and continued until it was closed 
 by the last illness of Mr. Burdette in 1914. Riley 
 realized and expressed always his debt to the encourage 
 ment and support of the older man, as indicated in a 
 letter written from Indianapolis in 1881, in which he 
 says: 
 
 Your letter, brief as it is, was a good thing to get, and I 
 thank you for it with a full heart. In reply to your query as 
 to my success, and how I like it, I answer, good. While the 
 public is not exactly clamoring for me, it is not ignoring my great 
 worth at least; and I am being almost daily assured by the 
 Chicago Hathaway that I m to be a big card ; and through 
 him, too, his Boston brother is evincing a special interest just 
 now. But I owe you everything, and when I am indeed pros 
 perous I can prove me love. 
 
 Yesterday I said good-bye to poor Charlie Philips. He 
 died the morning of the fifth. He always liked you, and made 
 me like you, long before I shook your hand. God bless and 
 rest him! 
 
 I am to have a few engagements East, the Boston branch 
 writes, but an audience at "The Hub", they intimate, will 
 cost me money probably, though I m going to ask them to get 
 it without if possible. 
 
 P. S. You are to be at Edinburg, near here, in a week or two, 
 and I m going to see you then if there s a way. Twittered 
 there not long ago myself to a good house too. 
 
 165 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Wish you could find time to write me a vagrant line or 
 two, with an occasional "pointer" about things that I m eter 
 nally groping after. 
 
 At the top of this letter, in Riley s painstaking 
 chirography, was the following limerick, evidently not 
 included in any of his published works: 
 
 "A carpenter up in Du Chien 
 Who had sliced off his nose with a plien, 
 Simply put up his thumb 
 To the place twas cut frum 
 And remarked, You can t do that agien! " 
 
 Riley s eastern successes followed upon the insistent 
 demand of Burdette that he let himself be known by 
 his platform appearances to Eastern audiences, and 
 the first appearance of the Hoosier poet in the Star 
 Lecture Course at Philadelphia was brought about by 
 the Hawk-Eye man s insistence and assistance. Com 
 paratively unknown in the East, it was necessary that 
 Riley be vouched for by some one whose platform 
 experience made his voucher altogether reliable. Mr. 
 Burdette personally interviewed Mr. Pugh, the man 
 ager of the Philadelphia Star Course, agreeing that if 
 Mr. Riley were given a place, he himself would take 
 the platform with him, and would arrange with Josh 
 Billings (Henry W. Shaw) to be one of a trio on the 
 occasion of Riley s appearance. Shaw opened the 
 programme with an address, and Mr. Burdette fol 
 lowed with an eloquent introduction of the Hoosier 
 poet. Mr. Riley s success was absolute and convinc 
 ing, and there was no greater joy in the heart of any 
 one of Riley s admirers than in that of Mr. Burdette. 
 
 Writing again from the Journal office in 1882, the 
 Hoosier poet thus responded to an invitation to visit 
 with Burdette at his suburban home at Ardmore: 
 166 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 Your letter is the most gracious thing that has come to 
 me for an age. It is ripe and mellow with all mirth and tender 
 ness. I laugh a world of tears up in my eyes, and then cry out 
 more; and if I could write one-half as good I d be too selfish 
 to ever give it away, but would keep it solely for myself, to 
 look at and pet and fondle and fool over when all the world 
 was dark and comfortless, and even the sunshine couldn t 
 touch a fellow up with any pulse of warmth. But you have 
 been more generous, and so I love you better than myself. 
 
 Your farm-talk tingles through the old "Benj. Johnson" 
 heart till I envy you your opportunity of gathering such 
 material as I could just now revel in and need so much. And 
 if I only could get to you there I d come on the wings of the 
 cyclone, but I think the way in which you have sketched your 
 rural environments will serve as inspiration for one other poem 
 at least. I could enjoy country life for any length of time with 
 you along; without such companionship, the first few months, 
 I fear, would be just a little trying. 
 
 Here all has not been, nor is, to say delectable. The sun 
 scorches us today tomorrow the rain whips us into draggled 
 ribbons, and the next day the cyclone spats us clean over the 
 county-line, and we grab a root and pray that the next day 
 will not find our bones bleaching on some alien strand. But 
 "the whirligig of time" giggles right along, and The Journal 
 seems to "stand in" with the racket and whizz and whirl and 
 swirl along about level with the general havoc. I have not 
 been as busy as I might have been, but am getting in a better 
 state of mind, and now feel that more good, and more of it, 
 is lurking near at hand in wait for me to catch up on. 
 
 The first page of the text of another letter is illus 
 trated with pencil sketches setting forth the spirit of 
 the following verse, with which it is adorned: 
 
 LITTLE JACK WISEMAN 
 
 "0 kind friendth and neighborth, come lithen unto me! 
 I m little Jacky Witheman, ath you can plainly thee. 
 I knowth all my letterth un can thay em upthide-down, 
 Un I can thpell about ath well ath any boy in town ; 
 Tony ith a big word, and tho ith Lady , too, 
 Un when I get to Balcony I ll be ath high ath you!" 
 
 167 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Riley was rapidly coming into his own. His eastern 
 successes had brought him a wider recognition in a 
 literary way and the story of his growth is set forth in 
 his inimitable fashion in the following letter: 
 
 INDIANAPOLIS, Aug. 6, 82. 
 DEAR BURDETTE: 
 
 I don t know of anything better than a letter from you; 
 and if you could see me run to meet em when they come, and 
 grab em up, and pet, and dandle em around, why I m almost 
 sure you d think the time you spare to me not wasted after all. 
 
 But I want to be with you there stirred up and mixed and 
 blended with the coolness of the woods the tempered warmth 
 of the sunshine, and the happy combination of the two. Where 
 I can chew "Star" Navy all day long and never feel the bitter 
 pangs of heartburn and where I could wad wet natural-leaf 
 into the bowel-cavity of a clay pipe and smoke till black in 
 the face, still smiling blandly. 
 
 my friend, Success is an exclusive kuss, but ever on 
 speaking terms, he sorto seems to like to "stand in" with "the 
 boys", after all. Le s forget him now, and just look over the 
 past! What do you say. Of course he s not as quick to see 
 things as we are; but when he comes forward as he does and 
 frankly acknowledges his error, why, of course, it s all right! 
 It s all right! Old man! Sail right! By yourses by yours! 
 Every thinggoes ! ! 
 
 Some time since I saw a paragraph floating about to the 
 effect that you had permanently retired from the lecture field, 
 but am glad to see by the Bureau "prospectus" that you will 
 still "argue". That s right you mustn t desert me. Fact 
 is I d feel might lonesome on the road, knowing all season long 
 that I had no prospect ahead of running across you, or your 
 colliding with me occasionally. Wish we could strike some 
 more of that joint business, as at Philadelphia, or do "double- 
 business" altogether. Why wouldn t that be a good thing. 
 Spose we test it a few places this season. Hathaway could 
 arrange a few choice points and laucks! W at larx! Seri 
 ously, now, think of it. 
 
 Another brief note from Greenfield in 1883 indicates 
 the tenderness of the friendship between the two men. 
 168 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 Mr. Burdette and family were then living amid the 
 beauty of a suburban Pennsylvania town, and their 
 home was designated by the poetic fancy of the Iowa 
 humorist as "Robin s Nest", the beauty of which was 
 set forth in published verses, which were acknowledged 
 in the following note: 
 
 GREENFIELD, IND., April 24, 83. 
 DEAR FRIEND: 
 
 Have I yet written you to say how your poem of The 
 Robin s Nest delighted, and still continues to delight me? It 
 is so exquisite so blossom-like, and blessed with dews and 
 airs and scents of happy summers and all the twittering songs 
 therein, that it has 
 
 Power to quiet 
 The restless pulse of care, 
 And falls like the benediction 
 That follows after prayer. 
 
 Always I think of you with gratitude, and your memory, 
 and your Robins , is always as warm and bright and clear and 
 pure as when 
 
 The June skies smile 
 
 And we wing our way by "still waters" awhile 
 Till the path to "green pastures" leads over a stile 
 To a garden quiet and low. God bless us, every one! 
 
 JAMES W. RILEY. 
 
 The publication of the first volume of Riley s poems 
 as by "Ben Johnson of Boone" brought another 
 warm-hearted and enthusiastic commendation from 
 Mr. Burdette s pen in the columns of the Hawk-Eye, 
 and Riley wrote in August, 1883: 
 
 ROCKVILLE, IND., Aug. 16, S3. 
 DEAR BURDETTE: 
 
 The notice in The Hawk-Eye of the "Ben Johnson" poems 
 is like all you do supremely good. My gratitude is like a 
 prayer as earnest and as honest and as pure. 
 
 169 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 How I would like to see you, my friend, and let the world 
 go by! But who can stop for breath, hungry as I am for the 
 long listless afternoon of an assured living. This yearning 
 just won t mix with poetry, or slip the ratchet of the reel of my 
 desires, but, as you once remarked in other sense, " I am getting 
 there," and no one, I am sure, will be gladder of it than your 
 self. And it will please you none the less that all the other 
 fixeder literary "jours" are indirectly hollering "Come on!" 
 The Boston fellows and the New York, with even now the 
 editors of magazines and latest of them to speak out, but 
 bravest in prophetic utterances, Joel Chandler Harris. For 
 give me even unto nine and ninety times should I so quote to 
 you his closing paragraph: "I do not know how old you are, 
 but you are the only verse-builder in my knowledge who has 
 caught the true American spirit and flavor. These are dis 
 tinctive, and will bring you distinction." 
 
 Now, honestly, I falter as I put it down but he said it, 
 and God knows how hard I am trying to believe it! The little 
 book will go through one more edition that we know of. Wish 
 we could have published East but couldn t, "Tomorrow and 
 tomorrow and tomorrow" and then we will "won t us, Pip? 
 And ever the best of friends." . . . 
 
 Frequently in their platform work their engagements 
 brought them close together, and whenever it was 
 possible they joined each other for a day or a night for 
 an exchange of recollections, philosophy, humor, and 
 all the joys of a sympathetic friendship, and their 
 correspondence continued in many scribbled notes 
 written in the intervals of lecturing, and conveying the 
 impressions of travel. For instance, a letter from Riley 
 in December, 1883: 
 
 Tonight I was to hear a religious lecture that impressed me, 
 and am inclined to send you, my good friend, these lines born 
 of it: 
 
 Out of the hitherwhere into the Yon 
 The land that the Lord s love lies upon: 
 Where one may rely on the friends he meets, 
 
 170 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 And the smiles that greet him along the streets. 
 Where the mother that left you years ago 
 Will lift the hands that were folded so, 
 And put them about you, with all the love 
 And tenderness you are dreaming of. 
 
 Out of the hitherwhere into the Yon 
 Where all of the friends of your youth have gone: 
 Where the old schoolmate that laughed with you, 
 Will laugh again as he used to do, 
 Coming to meet you, with such a face 
 As lights like a moon the wondrous place 
 Where God is living and glad to live, 
 Since he is the Master, and may forgive. 
 
 Out of the hitherwhere into the Yon 
 Stay the hopes we are leaning on! 
 You, Divine, with your merciful eyes 
 Looking down through the far-away skies, 
 Smile upon us, and reach and take 
 Our worn souls home, for the Savior s sake. 
 And, so, Amen for our all has gone 
 Out of the hitherwhere into the Yon. 
 
 Truly your friend, 
 
 J. W. RILEY. 
 
 On his thirty-eighth birthday Mr. Burdette wrote 
 to Mr. Riley the sum of his faith and philosophy, in a 
 letter altogether characteristic of the writer: 
 
 RILEY AVICK: We ve read yer letther an the pekthur on 
 the forud end ov it, an the papers ye sint and the pothry. It 
 wuz all good enough to ate, mon, but the sonnet to "The 
 Edithor" wuz the sandy pig av the litther, the pride av the pen. 
 
 My boy, tomorrow I will be 38 years old. How s that for 
 new hair, a third crop of teeth and a cord of wood without 
 spectacles every morning before breakfast. I m getting there 
 my tender Telemachus. And I m just as happy as I was when 
 I was weaned. Happier, my son; far happier. 
 
 171 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 I think Jacob sized it up when he told Pharaoh, "Few and 
 evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not 
 attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in 
 the days of their pilgrimage." No man could work more 
 days into one sentence than Jacob, when he had lots of time. 
 " But, as I was a savin ," he meted it out with the right measure. 
 He said his days had been "few", when "the days of the years 
 of his pilgrimage" had been 130 years, and he said they had 
 been "evil", when all the evil there was in them he had brought 
 upon himself. 
 
 God blesses us without our asking, and we bring the curses 
 upon ourselves. Why, I look back myself, and just see how 
 fair and bright are all the days of the years of all my pilgrimage, 
 save where my own faults, my own follies, my own wickedness, 
 have clouded the vistas. Take out the first 15 years, and I 
 wouldn t live one twelve-month over again. I wouldn t go 
 back and start again if I could. Every year is radiant with 
 blessings, every mile is bright with God s goodness, but my own 
 faults bristle among the flowers, and my own wretched handi 
 work mars and stains the fair plan of every day. And I 
 wouldn t trust myself to go through it all again. I m glad, 
 glad, glad that I m 38, with a chance to do better still before me. 
 
 I want to live to be 70, because I think I have a right to 
 my "three score years and ten". I want my whole ration, 
 but I don t care for any more. I have about as long to live 
 now, as I have already lived, and I want every day of it. But 
 when our good friend Death knocks at my door and says, 
 "Robert, it has just struck 70 by your hour glass," I will go 
 with him just as willingly as I ever followed the chairman of a 
 committee. 
 
 Seventy years is enough of it. By the time we reach the 
 half-way mile post, my boy, the songs the siren sang when we 
 were boys sound just as sweetly to us, but we are content to 
 lean (picture of siren) back in our comfortable arm-chairs and 
 listen to them. 
 
 We don t go banging our tender bones among the rocks to 
 learn the words; we are content to know the tune. The world 
 is fairer at 40 than it is at 20, because its vistas are longer, its 
 distances are greater, its horizon has a broader sweep. At 
 twenty there is a short life and little experience behind us, and 
 172 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 only the blank unlifted curtain of the future before us. We 
 only see the world in retrospect, and of this blessing, the older 
 man has the greater share. 
 
 It is a good old world, Riley; for 70 years. But that s the 
 distance. It wouldn t roll worth a cent on a century track. 
 I am going to take it for granted that I ll live to be 70. And 
 I won t ask for another day. What is sent over that is "com 
 plimentary". Sent right along, you see, because I m an old 
 subscriber. 
 
 But it s a good, beautiful world, too; full of good people 
 and dear friends. There are flowers and ferns and oaks and 
 vines enough to charm the eye, and even the weeds and bram 
 bles are pretty, viewed at a distance. I am satisfied with the 
 world and I couldn t make half so good a money, even if I had 
 the capital and material. 
 
 July 31. 
 
 And now, on Monday morning, comes a Journal with 
 your latest and one of your sweetest songs, published last 
 Saturday. Why, my boy, I believe I will appropriate that for 
 myself it comes in so aptly. Did you know Sunday was my 
 birthday? Did you write that poem for me? I will believe 
 you did, anyhow. It must be so. 
 
 Poor little Prince! He has been very sick. Got loose in 
 the orchard and devoured many green apples, had a fever and 
 is now convalescing slowly with a mouth full of cankers that 
 makes all hours a burden and meal time an agony to him. But 
 he feebly sends his love to "Mr. Riley", and wife and sister 
 join in kindest regards for the friend whose name is often on 
 our lips, and today, as I will be when 
 
 Tide of raptures long withdrawn 
 
 Flow back in summer floods, and fling 
 Here at our feet our childhood sweet 
 
 And all the songs we used to sing. 
 I am 
 
 Your friend, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 A glimpse of Riley s literary activities is obtained 
 in the following letter written in October of 1897: 
 
 173 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Your delinquent friend just couldn t write you sooner than 
 this living minute and even now is writing breathlessly. For 
 some months I ve been, day and night, in literary overalls, 
 drudging as never before. Last I saw you I think I told you I 
 meant to take a long rest and also give the public one. Well, 
 simply, I lied though with extenuation. Out of a clear sky 
 came up a poem no bigger than a man s hand, to start with, 
 but it grew and grew and likewise GREW, until behold! I 
 am, just this instant only, emerging from its awful shadow. 
 
 Not this one alone, but countless other lesser ones Christ 
 mas poems, ordered, as you know, in this unhallowed season 
 six of which I ve actually built the typewriter now "grittin" 
 its teeth over the last (I trust) a dod-gasted overbearing tale 
 in rhyme that has forced itself into nearly three hundred lines. 
 
 And yet, despite all this, I ve got up in the night to read 
 your latest and, I think, your best book. At home, too, the 
 folks have fought over it loving every wholesome word of it 
 the dearer, since as they all insist, it is so exactly and delectably 
 like its author. So long ago as I should have told you you 
 must now be rejoiced to know how very happily and affection 
 ately your book has been welcomed even, my dear friend, as 
 you would be in your inspiring person. 
 
 In November, 1897, Mr. Riley wrote: 
 
 Your inspiring hail across the spaces- 
 Fills me and thrills me with life divine, 
 
 Till the purple flood 
 
 Of my bounding blood 
 Breaks into riot of bloom and bud! 
 
 There now! See what a rapturous go-devil you ve let off in 
 my midst! Tomorrow I m to miss divine service at All Saints 
 Church, and a Thanksgiving dinner with the Rector thereof 
 but have I not your sacred page with its largess of compensation 
 for all I am denied elsewhere by blessed reason of my not 
 having brought along a frocktail coat which reminds me that 
 The Wise Purveyor, he knows. . . . 
 
 And maybe while you re wundern who 
 You ve fool-like lent your umbrell to 
 And want it out ll pop the sun 
 And you ll be glad you hain t got none! 
 174 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 By your list I see you ve been "ushV" round about old 
 Ind-anoplus so I m most earnestly hoping that you had a 
 stop-off there long enough to see the folks at your Lockerbie 
 home bless em for lovin you as they do! Fact is, old feller, 
 I believe I m a-lovin you just a little more and more, and gentler 
 and gentler all the time. Is it "cause I m a-kindo" clockin 
 along to rds the dusk of things? No odds! it s very lovely, 
 just the same; and my Thanksgiving impromptu, all honestly 
 and fervently reads: 
 
 "To all, each day or blithe and gay 
 With summer sun, or drear and gray 
 With winter weather come what may 
 It yet should be Thanksgiving Day." 
 
 Send us along an ahoy every chance you get. 
 
 And again, writing in 1898, Mr. Riley says: 
 
 gentlest of my friends! 
 
 How well I know the trials of protracted work like yours 
 now so you must know that with you I am rejoiced that but 
 a week or more of it intervenes between you and your heroic ly- 
 earned rest. So, God bless you, turn your every thought to 
 that contemplation solely! We ll all miss you at Winona, of 
 course; but no man-jack of us but will stoutly forgive your 
 absence, and wish you all depths of peace and solace in your 
 near haven of repose. 
 
 My own zest and vigor is not to say "Coltish", as I 
 pause here to furtively inspect it; in fact, little "rising" of the 
 condition of last year about this date save that now the 
 complications are by no means so variegated as to bedaze my 
 pseudo-mind, nor is my carelessness physically quite so unfore- 
 castful (if I may coin a term); so that I am even promising 
 myself not to eat every dainty of our lakeside hostlery; and 
 especially do I mean to tamper coyly with their shot-tower 
 berries and catfish-pies. I may put them in a deftly concealed 
 hand-satchel the bulk of them but not in my stomach, 
 though I die of sheer starvation under the groaning board. 
 (Ghawd! we know why that board groans don t us, Pip?) 
 
 But if you do get a word to us by our ending spread 
 how it would come indeed like a blessed benediction, when the 
 
 175 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 little bench-leg poet, say, got up at just the right place and 
 smote em with the unexpected glory! 
 
 The best love of the Lockerbie home with my own is here 
 with blent. To be so universally loved as you are surpasses 
 all other earthly treasures and will not that be, likewise, 
 Heaven s best offering? 
 
 With all abiding faith and love, 
 
 JAMESY. 
 
 The illness of the Hoosier poet in 1899 brought at 
 once a tender letter from his friend of the old days of 
 the Hawk-Eye and Journal, to which there came a 
 response, saying: 
 
 It s very lovely and uplifting all you say and do. Read 
 ing your written or printed words, the yet wobbly little old 
 invalid gets a new hold on hope and cheer, and faith to match 
 both this world and the next. My grateful heart is wholly 
 yours, in consequence. 
 
 Following Mr. Burdette s letter to Mr. Riley Mr. 
 Burdette himself went to see and cheer his old Hoosier 
 friend. The story of the meeting of those two loving 
 and lovable souls was told by Mr. Burdette in "An 
 Autumn Day with Riley", published in December, 
 1899, in which Mr. Burdette said: 
 
 "LOCKERBIE STREET 
 
 "Such a dear little street it is, nestled away 
 From the noise of the city and heat of the day, 
 In cool, shady coverts of whispering trees, 
 With their leaves lifted up to shake hands with the breeze, 
 Which in all its wide wanderings never may meet 
 With a resting place fairer than Lockerbie Street!" 
 
 Years ago I read the poem, by James Whitcomb Riley, of 
 which this is the opening stanza. It has the natural, child- 
 dancing step of his heart poems, and the name fitted in so well 
 with the rhythm, that I thought it was merely one of Fancy s 
 songs, with an airy habitation and a dream name. Because in 
 those days Jamesie didn t live on Lockerbie Street, and never 
 176 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 expected to pitch his tent on that pleasant city lane, which 
 didn t belong in town at all, but which loitered too long at the 
 edge of the meadow, and was overtaken and hemmed in by 
 the growing city, always hungry for the pastures and the fring 
 ing woods that lie without the walls. 
 
 But in course of time the poet drifted into this bit of country 
 that lay under the noisy pavement-waves of the restless city, 
 like another Atlantis, and there, in the home of Major and 
 Mrs. Holstein, found himself a dweller on the Lockerbie Street 
 he had sung, years agone. This is his home, a handful of boys 
 miles away from his boyhood s home, his birthplace Green 
 field, the focus of "Poems There at Home"; the starting point 
 for "Old Aunt Mary s"; the place where the "Old Fashioned 
 Roses" still grow; a pleasant land of sunny memories Green 
 field, where "The Old Band" used to play 
 "Sich tunes as John Brown s Body and Sweet Alice/ don t 
 you know; 
 
 And "The Camels is A-comin" and John Anderson, My Jo ; 
 
 And a dozen others of em Number Nine and Number 
 Leven 
 
 Was favo-rites that fairly made a feller dream of heaven. 
 
 And when the boys ud saranade, I ve laid so still in bed, 
 
 I ve even heard the locus blossoms droppin on the shed, 
 
 When Lily Dale er Hazel Dell had sobbed and died away 
 
 ... I want to hear the old band play." 
 
 More than a score of years ago I spoke my piece one winter 
 night in Spencer, Ind. While not many miles away, Mr. Riley 
 was charming an audience in Bloomington, where is the State 
 University and a live chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. 
 It was a stormy night. A glare of ice covered the ground, and on 
 this ice a rain was falling to make the slippiness slicker. It was 
 all that the attraction of gravitation could do to keep from slid 
 ing off and joining the leonids and other loose and wandering 
 things. 
 
 1 The Bloomington hall was an oddly-constructed affair. The 
 stairway opened right in the middle of the hall, abruptly as a 
 trap door. So, if any one came in late, he loomed up before 
 the astonished lecturer and in the midst of the audience, like 
 an apparition from the nether, world. The poet-lecturer was 
 getting along splendidly, and he was in the midst of some very 
 pathetic little sketch in rhyme, about mid-evening. 
 
 12 177 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Suddenly the hasty steps of a belated season-ticket holder 
 smote the stairway with emphatic impatience, leaping up the 
 long flight two steps at a time. The patron shot up into view, 
 panting and breathless, his ticket held out in his extended hand, 
 his eager eyes divided between the poet and a rolling search for 
 the place where his seat ought to be. In his haste he climbed 
 the extra step the one that wasn t there. It threw him off 
 his balance; he tripped, stumbled, fell, and went rolling, thump 
 ing, thundering down the long stairway, clear to the bottom. 
 A chorus of shrieks arose from the women-folk; three or four 
 young men sprang to their feet and hurried downstairs in strag 
 gling order, to help the fallen ticket-holder, the poet paused in 
 his lecture, and the house was silent as sepulcher. Then, half 
 way down the stairs, a voice, tremulous with anxious fear, 
 called out: 
 
 "Is he alive?" 
 
 A second of silence, intense, full of strained apprehension 
 and fear, then the answering voice came up like a rocket, thrilled 
 with amazement: 
 
 "By Georgs he isn t here!" 
 
 Murmurs of surprise floated up the stairway as the rescue 
 party hurried on down, and there was that agitated, nervous 
 rustle in the hall, which is the way a crowd speaks without 
 moving the lips. Presently, from out of doors, came again, in 
 emphasized amazement, a voice from the relief expedition: 
 
 "I can t find him!" 
 
 Then the murmurs ran farther away. By and by a dis 
 tant shout, mingled with laughter, came back into the hall: 
 " Caesar s ghost ! Here he is ! " 
 
 And there he was, sure enough. He had rolled downstairs, 
 out of the open doors; there he struck the ice at the foot of the 
 doorstep, went sliding down the long walk on the water-smooth 
 glare like a human toboggan, clear out to the edge of the square, 
 "and if it hadn t been for the court-house fence," said Riley, 
 "he would have slid clear out into the street and half way to 
 Spencer!" 
 
 Was he hurt? Nobody ever knew. He never would tell. 
 When the relief expedition found him, he was floundering about 
 in a little pool with an icy bottom; struggling to get on his 
 feet, falling down with a sprawling splash twice as often as he 
 178 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 got half-way up, the maddest man that ever fought against 
 the icy ruler of the inverted year, while he pelted the night with 
 language hot enough to thaw the North Pole, like the man 
 
 "IN THE SMOKER 
 
 " Well/ says he, 
 Now, what s yourn? he says to me: 
 
 I chawed on for quite a spell 
 Then I speaks up, slow and dry: 
 Jes tobacker! I says I 
 
 And you d orto heerd em yell!" 
 
 That night Mr. Riley drove over to Spencer to catch a 
 train. I came down from my room about 4 A. M., and found him 
 at a table drawn up before a roaring grate fire, writing poetry, 
 drying and steaming, and solacing himself with a cigar, which 
 was evidently comforting him for all hardships past and troubles 
 to come. We rode into Indianapolis together. 
 
 "What kind of a time did you have in Spencer?" he asked. 
 I told him that the committee and the newspaper men kindly 
 braved the storm rather than have the hall closed on me, and 
 queried: "How did you get along, Jamesie?" 
 
 "Oh," he said, cheerfully, "I held the janitor spellbound 
 for an hour and a half!" 
 
 The following narrative by Mr. Burdette typifies 
 his descriptive genius: 
 
 A RILEY RECEPTION 
 
 The orchard lands of Long Ago ! 
 drowsy winds, awake, and blow 
 The snowy blossoms back to me 
 And all the buds that used to be! 
 
 Blow back the melody that slips 
 In lazy laughter from the lips 
 That marvel much if any kiss 
 Is sweeter than the apple s is. 
 Blow back the twitter of the birds 
 The lisp, the twitter and the words 
 
 179 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Of merriment that found the shine 
 
 Of summer time a glorious wine 
 
 That drenched the leaves that loved it so, 
 
 In orchard lands of Long Ago! 
 
 Once upon a time, a-many years ago, Indianapolis, which 
 worships Riley even as it loves him, was bent upon giving him 
 a reception. They sent for Eugene Field and Edgar Wilson Nye 
 to come and assist. The Grand Opera House was packed until 
 people began to fall out of the windows. Purt nigh. The 
 programme arrangement was Nye, Field, Riley. But when 
 the curtain rang up, Mr. Riley appeared. 
 
 He explained that he was out of his place on the programme 
 merely to make a little announcement concerning Mr. Nye. 
 The humorist was a victim to a hereditary affliction in regard to 
 which he was morbidly sensitive. It was quite noticeable, and 
 sometimes, when people laughed at the bright humor of the 
 lecture, Mr. Nye, with his peculiar sensitiveness, thought they 
 were laughing at this physical defect, and it humiliated and 
 embarrassed him, even to the extent, at times, of making him 
 forget his lines. 
 
 Mr. Riley asked the audience, therefore, out of considera 
 tion for Mr. Nye s feelings, to remain perfectly quiet during 
 his reading, and especially to refrain from any laughter. He 
 would add, that the affliction was merely a slight tendency to 
 premature baldness. 
 
 Well, the audience put on a decorous, sympathetic look, 
 when Nye came on, making his first bow to an Indianapolis 
 congregation, bending that hairless, glistening billiard ball of a 
 head before them. The house gasped and then most incon 
 tinently roared. When he could command silence, Nye said 
 that he had been summoned there by telegraph a compli 
 ment indeed, which he highly appreciated. He was glad to 
 come. But the audience would observe as the entertainment 
 proceeded, that while he and Mr. Field would appear together, 
 and Mr. Riley and Mr. Field would be on the platform at the 
 same time, he and Mr. Riley would not come on together. 
 To explain these separate appearances of himself and "the 
 star", he would read Mr. Riley s telegram of invitation: 
 
 " Edgar Wilson Nye Come to Indianapolis and appear at 
 my reception. Be sure to bring a dress suit. 
 180 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 "P.S. Don t forget the trousers. I have a pair of 
 suspenders." 
 
 For a moment the jest hung fire. Then somebody tittered, 
 the fuse sizzled down to the boxes, and then the gallery fell. 
 
 Riley and Nye and Field. What a trio. And today Riley 
 stands alone, recalling in his memories of yesterday, the friends 
 who laughed and sang with him that night. 
 
 "0, the days gone by! 0, the days gone by! 
 The music of the laughing lip, the luster of the eye; 
 The childish faith in fairies, and Aladdin s magic ring 
 The simple, soul-reposing, glad belief in everything; 
 When life was like a story, holding neither sob nor sigh, 
 In the golden, olden glory of the days gone by. 
 
 Happy days they were. How they bubbled over with 
 laughter. How many times I have turned one or two hundred 
 miles out of my way, just to get to Indianapolis for a day and 
 a night with Riley. I met him at the door of the Journal office 
 one night. "Where are you going?" he demanded. "No 
 where," I said. "Anywhere. I ve just come down from La 
 Porte to put in one campfire with you." He said he had an 
 assignment to report a "wind fight", but he would sub-let it, 
 which he did. The "wind fight" was an oratorical contest. 
 
 And we prowled about Indianapolis, and climbed up into 
 newspaper offices, and invaded the rooms of fellows whom we 
 knew, or loitered here and there by ourselves, under no pretext 
 of hunting material, or making "character studies", or of 
 doing anything else useful merely filling the night with our 
 talk, and the delight of being with each other. 
 
 "OUR KIND OF A MAN. 
 "The kind of a man for you and me! 
 He faces the world unflinchingly, 
 And smites, as long as the wrong resists, 
 With a knuckled faith and force like fists. 
 He lives the life he is preaching of, 
 And loves where most is the need of love; 
 His voice is clear to the deaf man s ears, 
 And his face sublime through the blind man s fears; 
 
 181 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 He strikes straight out for the Right and he 
 Is the kind of a man for you and me!" 
 
 And James Whitcomb Riley unconsciously describes him 
 self. A brave, strong, patient life has been his, the inner 
 sanctuaries of it known only to his most intimate friends. A 
 year or two ago I read through a packet of letters written by 
 him when he was a care-free youth of 19 or 20, maybe. They 
 were written in his wandering days, penciled on soft tablet 
 paper; written here and there in the resting times at this town 
 or that, and sometimes by the roadside. They were written 
 to a comrade of his own age. 
 
 There was no reason why the writer should not have 
 dropped into the easy, slip-shod sometimes slovenly manner 
 into which so many men about everybody except you and 
 me are so apt to slide when they write to each other. The 
 English of those letters is correct, the phraseology is refined; 
 only once or twice in the dozen letters does he use any dialect, 
 and then it is "quoted". And for the tone and matter of the 
 letters, they are clean and pure as a girl s. Any one of them 
 might have been written to his mother or his sisters. That 
 was the boy Riley, and that has been the life of the man. How 
 gentle he is, all the world of his readers knows. How loving 
 and loyal-hearted he is, his friends of the inner circle know. 
 And if you want to know how a singer can be loved and honored 
 in his own city and country, go to Indianapolis and hear them 
 talk about Jamesie. 
 
 "Peared-like, he was more satisfied 
 
 Jes lookin at Jim, 
 And likin him all to hisself-like, see? 
 
 Cause he was jes wrapped up in him! 
 And over and over I mind the day 
 The old man came and stood round in the way 
 While we was drillin , a-watchin Jim 
 And down at the deepot a-hearin him say, 
 
 Well, good-by, Jim; 
 
 Take keer of yourse f ! " 
 
 There are abundant humorous and tender passages 
 in the many letters that passed between Burdette and 
 182 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 Riley. In a fragment of a letter from Riley, for 
 instance, is this: 
 
 You don t know the thousand friends you have here, and 
 everywhere. Everybody loves you, and so you have full 
 reason to be the happy man you are. God bless you always 
 and the gudewife and the bairn! Tell all my friends I love 
 them and want to play side-show with em every day. Reed, 
 Hilt, and all the Journal people send regards. 
 
 And this recollection from Burdette to Riley: 
 
 The first time I ever "met up" with Robert Mclntyre I 
 heard him preach down in Charleston, Illinois. And he quoted 
 a stanza or two from "Out to Old Aunt Mary s". So the two 
 of you for you know how Mclntyre can quote anything he 
 loves have been coupled in my thought ever since. And this 
 Christmas brought me that beautiful holiday edition of the 
 poem with my name on the dedication page. Proud? Prouder 
 than if I d written the poem. Sent a copy straight away to 
 Mclntyre, who is my neighbor in Los Angeles. He was born 
 ripe, and he gets sweeter and mellower as he grows nearer to 
 the youth of immortality. 
 
 I m not going to try to thank you for your thought of me 
 in such well-beloved company. I think maybe I could thank 
 any one else for any other thing, but this, from you, spells the 
 years backward for me in a charm that transforms all phrase of 
 speech into loving silence. If I could stand face to face with 
 you now, I d only hold your hand and laugh. For if I didn t 
 laugh I d have to cry. And I don t look pretty when I cry. 
 
 What ambrosial nights there were on the calendar when 
 " Ben Johnson " was alive ! And there was an iron fence around 
 the Circle, and the Undertaker s shop hard by, which was a 
 sobering place to look into as we hied for our beds! When the 
 day was made for pleasure and the night for fun, and we worked 
 Jim, when did we do our work in those days? But we did it 
 and lots of it and people read it and cried for more. 
 
 Come out to Sunnycrest, Comrade of Yesterday. Your 
 room looks out over the town and up to the Sierras. And it is 
 pleasant out here all the year round, and we ll be glad as glad 
 
 183 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 if only you ll come! Madame sends affectionate invitations 
 and welcomes, and I am as ever, 
 
 Affectionately and faithfully yours, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 Closing a note to Mr. Riley in 1899: 
 
 I am, as I always have been, and down to the sunset rim 
 of eternity I will be, your friend. 
 
 And again, ten years later, Mr. Burdette writes 
 him: 
 
 God bless every bone in your body. Two hundred and 
 forty-eight of them, ain t there? Every time you break one 
 that makes another blessing for the extra piece. Whole 
 blessing too. 
 
 Jamesy, if you don t come out here some time, we are 
 coming to Indianapolis again. Every now and then we get 
 hungry just for a look at you. Come out and make us a Mexi 
 can visit that lasts till the kitchen larder and cellar are scraped 
 to the bottom of the barrel. And if you don t like your room, 
 we will tear that whole end of the house down and build it over 
 on your designs. 
 
 And at the request of a boy friend of Burdette for 
 an autograph of Riley, he sent this letter: 
 
 Here is a boy of fifteen, who says his prayers to you, 
 "speaks" your pieces in assemblies of my church and frankly 
 admitted that he had never read anything of mine and didn t 
 know that I wrote anything, and your autograph would be a 
 living blessing to him. Sit down while you think of it, and 
 send him his halo. 
 
 Yours with the love of all the yesterdays. 
 
 From Athens, Greece, in 1901, Mr. Burdette wrote 
 him: 
 
 Sometimes I just get plum homesick to see a line of your 
 hand-write! 
 184 
 
FRIENDSHIP WITH RILEY 
 
 We are enjoying this land of fact and myth, fancy and 
 reality, history and romance, truth and fiction, song, story and 
 deed and I ve wished a dozen times that you were here to 
 help me see it. I ve seen so many things thro your eyes, that 
 I ve sorto got into a way of dependin on em, like an old man 
 with his specs, and find myse f lookin around an sayin , 
 "Where s them eyes o Jim s?" 
 
 Well, where AIR they? Lookin to rds me, I hope. 
 
 And in the mellow light of the sunset years Mr. 
 Burdette wrote: 
 
 Remember every day, if the hours grow long and the inac 
 tion tiresome, there are people in this home who think of you 
 every day, and who add the "Amen" of " God bless him always" 
 to every thought of you. It is a daily joy to me to think how 
 our lives came together, to read between the lines often as I 
 read your songs of friendship and hope, of love and good cheer, 
 to recall the old days when the world was new and young, and 
 made for us to play with. God bless and keep you always, 
 dear friend of my yesterdays and the dearer friend of today. 
 
 Writing from Florida, after his serious illness, and 
 after Mr. Burdette s health had broken, Mr. Riley said: 
 
 I still progress toward my usual health, but the recovery 
 is necessarily very, very slow. Surely, therefore, I am in sym 
 pathy with your state of health, though in no wise am I per 
 suaded of its seriousness. In some good way strange though 
 it may seem to us I am assured of your happy recovery. If 
 you could know one tithe of the universal sympathy that is 
 yours you would be cheered and heartened as a happy boy. 
 
 When I read and read again your letter it is with smiles 
 and tears, yet more of the smiles, thank God, than the troublous 
 mists. That is right and true and brave, as you ever were 
 hale, wholesome and sound and sweet with the old faith. 
 
 And the last letter of the Hoosier poet to his friend 
 was written less than a month before Mr. Bur- 
 dette s death, and was in acknowledgment of the 
 printed volume of the latter s last literary work: 
 
 185 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 If you could know with what joy your new book has been 
 read by our household, and with what degree of pathos we have 
 been touched as well, I feel assured of your like delight and 
 fervor mingling with our own. For, truly, the chronicle s per 
 formance is most satisfying. I give you, therefore, great honor 
 and renown. The publishers here are equally enthusiastic 
 over the work Mrs. Burdette s part as well as your own. My 
 fervid affection is yours and hers, together with Mrs. Holstein s 
 greetings, and a good all-hail from you will complete my great 
 happiness. 
 
 186 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 BREAKING TIES 
 
 WITH the continued illness of his wife and the 
 gradual growth of his platform and literary 
 work, came the regretful decision that he 
 must leave Burlington. The summer of 
 1879 he spent at St. John, New Brunswick, in the hope 
 that the change of climate might be beneficial to the 
 patient little woman who had suffered so long and so 
 intensely, and whose health was always his first con 
 sideration. 
 
 On his return from Canada there is a paragraph in 
 one of his letters that gives a subtle reflection of their 
 sympathy and understanding: 
 
 Here, too, we can look across the river and see Ogdensburg, 
 N. Y. It is the land of the free. 
 
 "It is home," says Her Little Serene Highness, softly, as 
 we gazed from the car windows. 
 
 "It is where I pay taxes," I replied harshly. 
 
 " It is where you draw your salary," she says reproachfully, 
 and I am rebuked to silence and try to think of something 
 patriotic to say. Presently she says, with a wave of her brown 
 eyes over the land we love: 
 
 "It is a beautiful land, is it not?" 
 
 "Yes," I whisper softly, "yes, it is a beautiful land." 
 
 "Well," she said cheerfully, "I have a blue-eyed baby at 
 home who is going to be President of all that land some of these 
 days, maybe." 
 
 I never thought of it that way before. It threw me into a 
 brown study and for two hours I sat in silence wondering if the 
 boy would not do something handsome for the old man when 
 he got in. 
 
 187 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 That her condition showed some improvement from 
 the change is indicated by the fact that upon his return 
 from the sea coast of Canada he was fixed in his resolu 
 tion to remove permanently to the sea coast, and in the 
 following spring we find this paragraph in the Hawk-Eye 
 of May 27, 1880: 
 
 Mr. Robert J. Burdette, who has broken up house-keeping 
 for the purpose of taking his wife to the seashore for the benefit 
 of her health, started East with his family yesterday. They go 
 to Peoria to spend the Sabbath, and thence to some point on the 
 sea coast. Mrs. Burdette s health was greatly benefited by 
 her sojourn at New Brunswick last summer, and her physicians 
 advise her to remain near the sea for some time to come. Her 
 health during the past winter, we regret to say, has been poor, 
 and while hosts of warm friends will sadly miss her and her 
 household, they will rejoice in the prospect of her restoration 
 to health. 
 
 And the Burlington Gazette of May 25, 1880, in 
 noting their departure, said: 
 
 They will be missed in the church in which Mrs. Burdette 
 was a very active member, and in the social circle, where " Bob ", 
 with his brilliant and witty conversation was always a welcome 
 member, but "Bob" will not be lost entirely, for his connection 
 with the Hawk-Eye remains unchanged, and his sparkling letters 
 and pungent paragraphs will continue to enliven the columns 
 of that sheet as heretofore. 
 
 That summer they spent at Nantucket, Mass., and 
 a characteristic letter was that written by him on 
 August 3,[to Doctor J. H. Vincent, founder of Chau- 
 tauqua, expressing his sorrow at his inability to appear 
 before Chautauqua. It tells the story of the disappoint 
 ing search for health: 
 
 You will be pleased to learn, and it will gratify the intelli 
 gent thousands at the lake when you inform them that I will 
 not be there on the 9th. I can t do very much good in this 
 
 188 
 
BREAKING TIES 
 
 world, and it occurs to me sometimes that I could do as much 
 by keeping my mouth shut as by following my tongue s free 
 course. I wish I had the inspiration oftener. I think if it 
 came to me fifty times a day I would be wiser and happier. 
 At any rate I would have fewer foolish remarks to repent of 
 when night and penitence came on together. 
 
 If it should happen that any one might feel disappointed 
 by my failing to talk on the 9th, I am profoundly sorry for 
 that person s mistaken sense of disappointment; assure him 
 that it is no novelty to hear me chatter. My flashes of silence 
 are the brightest and rarest charms I possess. And I am not 
 rich in them. Ah, no! I am woefully poverty-stricken. Some 
 times I haven t enough to go around. Let them be thankful that 
 they will have an opportunity of hearing me when I am quiet. 
 
 Seriously, and in all "truth and soberness", I cannot come. 
 Mrs. Burdette s health if the poor little sufferer s combina 
 tion of aches and pains and helplessness may be designated by 
 such a sarcastic appellation has been steadily failing all 
 winter, and we have come down to this sea-girt island to see if 
 old ocean and its breezes may do what the doctors and moun 
 tains and prairies have failed to do. And here we are waiting. 
 "Her Little Serene Highness" in utter helplessness, unable to 
 stand alone (for years she has been unable to walk), her help 
 less hands folded in her lap; she must be dressed, carried about, 
 cared for like a baby, suffering from countless pains and aches, 
 day and night, and I cannot leave her even for a few days. No 
 one at Chautauqua will feel the disappointment as we do, for 
 we had planned to go there together. If she could go with me, 
 I would be glad enough to creep to Chautauqua on my knees. 
 Her life has been a fountain of strength to me. 
 
 In her long years I have never seen the look of pain out of 
 her eyes, and for more than half so long I have seen her sitting 
 in patient helplessness, and I have never heard a complaining 
 murmur from her lips while she has served as those who only 
 stand and wait, never questioning and never doubting the 
 wisdom and the goodness of the Father whose hand has been 
 laid upon her so heavily. The beautiful patience of her life 
 has been a constant rebuke to my own impatience, and in her 
 sufferings I have seen and known and believed the "love that 
 knows no fear", and the faith that "knows no doubt". 
 
 189 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 But I am tiring the busiest man in Chautauqua with a 
 long letter when all that he wishes to know is that I can t 
 come and lecture as I promised I would. I would like to do two 
 or three things that I can t. With a long apology for taking 
 up so much of your time, and a thousand wishes for a happy 
 and successful summer at Chautauqua, I am truly your friend, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 In the autumn of 1880 they returned from Nan- 
 tucket to Philadelphia, where the invalid wife was 
 placed in the National Surgical Institute in the hope 
 that science and skilled care might do what change of 
 climate had failed to accomplish. And from that as a 
 center he made his lecture trips, returning always when 
 there was an interval long enough between lectures to 
 permit a trip back to Philadelphia. 
 
 The summer of 1881 they spent at St. Andrews, 
 New Brunswick. It followed a busy winter season for 
 him, for in a letter written just before his departure, 
 he notes that since the 9th day of November, 1880, he 
 had filled 134 lecture engagements and traveled 20,560 
 miles. He wrote the Hawk-Eye just before his return 
 to the platform in the fall of that year: 
 
 I will admit right here, as a sort of postscript, that I have 
 been a very bad, lazy boy all this fall. I haven t written any 
 letters and I haven t tried to. I will make a free and frank 
 confession of all my shortcomings. Ghostly Hawk-Eye, I 
 accuse myself of various and numerous faults. 
 
 I accuse myself of a love of ease. 
 
 I accuse myself of a hatred for work. 
 
 I confess that I have a good voice for sleep. 
 
 I accuse myself of throwing a quart of ink and a box of 
 pens into the Susquehanna River. 
 
 I accuse myself of wishing those were all the pens and that 
 was all the ink in the world. 
 
 I accuse myself for spending all my postage stamps for 
 cigars. 
 190 
 
BREAKING TIES 
 
 I accuse myself of wanting to be cashier of a Newark Na 
 tional Bank for about fifteen minutes. 
 
 That is the kind of a duck I am, ghostly Hawk-Eye, but 
 I promise to do better. 
 
 I promise myself that every day. 
 
 I make more promises in half an hour than I can keep in 
 ten years. 
 
 I can t imagine where all my promises go. I can t keep 
 them; but I am positive nobody else takes them. 
 
 A stranger may, sometimes, but he never does it again. 
 
 So no more at present. 
 
 It was in the spring of 1883 that he finally settled 
 upon Ardmore, a suburban town not far from Philadel 
 phia, as the ideal spot for a home, and to that place he 
 removed his family. Of his life there, possibly the best 
 picture is given us in a letter written by James Whit- 
 comb Riley to the Indianapolis Journal, following a 
 visit by Mr. Riley just after his Philadelphia appear 
 ance: 
 
 I am just back into the city here, after a delightful day and 
 night with Burdette at his home in Ardmore a quiet, lulling, 
 pastoral little town, out of the clang and worry of the city, but 
 still, as our managing editor might remark, in his simple and 
 sententious way, in "close propinquity" to the metropolis, 
 where every half hour through the day the trains go dancing in 
 with such exact promptness and certainty that the Jester very 
 seriously asserts that he never winds his watch up when at home. 
 And what a very tranquil, happy, perfect little picture of a 
 home it is! 
 
 Securely alienated from the rush and wrangle of the cars, 
 and sitting snug within the center of a smooth square lawn, it 
 looks, in its quaint architecture, porticos and gables, like a 
 picturesque design in some bit of tinted worsted work that 
 women please their cunning fingers building; and then, to 
 carry out the simile, the trim sward has a lace-like fence to 
 edge it, with "open-work" at either corner, where the carriage 
 of "Her Little Serene Highness" flashes and semi-circles in 
 and out on every sunny day. 
 
 191 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 For in their new home Mrs. Burdette is more improved in 
 health, and in contentment, too, than when, by travel, up to a 
 year ago, she sought relief from her long suffering. " For this 
 is home!" she said, glancing proudly and most fondly around 
 the twinkling parlor, " and although I can t skurry up and down 
 it with a dustpan and a broom, I can lean back here and leis 
 urely devise all sorts of things to do, and have them faithfully 
 and promptly done since," she naively added, "being help 
 less myself, you know, the blessed household humors me, with 
 such patience and good-nature, that I half believe sometimes 
 I m not exacting after all!" And then we all laughed, and she 
 as heartily as any, which merriment in some odd way reminded 
 her eccentric husband of numerous examples of her "tyranny", 
 "submissively endured", he meekly said, "through an arid 
 waste of wedded bliss ten years in length twice that in breadth, 
 and a century in circumference". But all the time the speech 
 consumed the little wife smiled on unwaveringly, appreciating 
 fully the perfect beauty of the fabrication, and, like the doll s 
 dressmaker, with a sage look, back of all, suggestive of that 
 oracle s pet phrase, " Oh, I know your tricks and your manners, 
 my fine gentleman!" 
 
 And the Burdette home is filled with other music than the 
 Jester s laugh. There is the piano and flute and violin the 
 latter, now, however, he seldom touches since his wife s afflic 
 tion she having always in "the days lang syne" accompanied 
 his violin with the piano, and now, the once deft fingers shut 
 in the close grip of her relentless malady, his own refuse to 
 caper up and down the strings. But they sing together still 
 and her bright sister, Miss Garrett, with them and "the 
 Prince" as well, who, by the way, is so brimmed with melody 
 he even sings in sleep, and all the silent beauty of his Kinder 
 garten dreams is often filled with vocal scamperings of the 
 "Three Blind Mice", or the staccattoed echoes of the tinklings 
 of the hoof -tips of Old Kriss Kringle s reindeer on thereof. 
 
 And again, in memory, listening to veritable specimens of 
 all this summer melody at Ardmore, a voice of some kind sings 
 to me like this: 
 
 Forever the birds are there, 
 
 And ever the song of the birds, 
 And ever the exquisite, intricate air 
 
 Of laughter and loving words; 
 192 
 
BREAKING TIES 
 
 And ever the robin trill 
 
 In the winter as well as the spring, 
 And even the nest that the white snow fills 
 
 Holds ever the birds that sing. 
 
 0, ever the birds are there! 
 
 Singing so clear and strong, 
 That the melody of the joy they share 
 
 Is one with the angel s song; 
 And the wee bird wakes in the nest 
 
 To twitter and pipe and call, 
 Till the world of sighs is a world unguessed, 
 
 And the world of song is all. 
 
 And the artistic talents of "the Prince" are wonderful. 
 "Keeps his thumb parboiled turning the leaves of books for 
 pictures/ 7 said the enthusiastic father, whose early youth, as 
 well as the son s, must have dogs-eared many a pictured volume, 
 as one could but surmise, seeing him deftly "set a copy" for 
 the boy to reproduce; and, again, ushered above into the "lair" 
 of the versatile author, one could but acknowledge the conclu 
 sive evidence of his artistic skill, in crayon, paint and pencil, 
 as in ink. 
 
 "The lair" is a cozy corner room, a south window looking 
 down upon "my neighbor s truck patch", of which the Jester 
 went on to say, that, as insignificant a libel on a farm as it 
 appeared to be, a stranger glancing at it could have no idea of 
 how much produce the old man pulled out of the ground there 
 annually. "And this western window," he continued, moving 
 toward it, "gives out, you will observe, upon the back lot of 
 the baronial demesne, and a goat, whose unfortunate tempera 
 ment you may find suggested by his being tied to the fence." 
 
 "At considerable expense," he went on, smiling, "I secured 
 that goat, a year ago, to amuse the Prince; and later, I secured 
 him to save the boy from an ignominious end. But but," he 
 continued, gravely, "let me not speak further in the presence 
 of me childe of a subject that can but recall to him the pangs of 
 memories better buried in the past forever ! " At the conclusion 
 of this speech the expression of the Prince s face grew dubious, 
 and he hinged out at the door with a rebuking air that brought 
 
 13 193 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 a look of genuine remorse to the father s eyes, as he hurried to 
 bring back the truant and reinstate himself in royal favor. 
 
 On either side of the writer s desk, which occupies the 
 center of the room, stand two home-made book cases, filled 
 with miscellaneous works, among which the more prominent 
 are Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray, Harte and Twain, Long 
 fellow, Holmes, Hood, Keats and Tennyson. And then there 
 is a scattering number of simply humorous versifiers, together 
 with compilations of the odds and ends of all the American wits, 
 from Darby down to Bill Nye, of the Boomerang. On the top 
 shelves are heaps of curious mementoes, gifts from admiring 
 friends, souvenirs and trifles of every conceivable kind and from 
 all parts of the world Indian relics, crystals, corals, shells, 
 mosses, ores, stalactites and what-not indescribable. 
 
 And on the walls: First, a legend in Hebrew, Greek or 
 Scandinavian I couldn t tell; anyway some biblical quota 
 tion, traced by the skillful hand of the humorist s missionary 
 brother, now over seas and ministering in some far orient in his 
 chosen life-work. And near this is a life-sized portrait of Mrs. 
 Burdette, painted a short while after her marriage, while directly 
 over it, and trailing its silken tassels against the frame below is 
 the old starred and scarred flag of Burdette s regiment, when 
 long ago he stilled his boyish laughter, and went forth, with 
 square jaws and uncurved lips and face set straight against the 
 leaden sleet of battle, until the glad sunlight of victory broke 
 through the clouds and gave him newer right to laugh, and lent 
 his country life to join his merriment. 
 
 On the panels of the doors are artistically-arranged por 
 traits of notables in his own line, fellow-editors, newspaper 
 men, etc., with the central positions given to such heads as 
 Bryant s, Greeley s, Weed s, Bennett s and the like. 
 
 The walls, wherever one may turn, are filled with pencil 
 and pen sketches some from applausive professionals in art, 
 some from bright amateurs all clever, keen and thoroughly 
 appreciative of the crisp and wholesome humor of the jolly 
 themes of their inspiration and many of the very brightest 
 of the lot, I was overjoyed to learn were from the pencil of a 
 "Hoosier" artist, Miss M. C. McDonald of Camden. And so 
 it is, I may parenthetically add, that in whatever State I find 
 myself, I find, as well, some happy cause to "toss my ready 
 cap in air" and shout for Indiana. 
 194 
 
BREAKING TIES 
 
 Not the last in worth of all these sketches are many from 
 the humorist s own conceit and skillful finish. Around the 
 margin of the ceiling he is now painting a frieze of comic pic 
 tures of his own design, such as a kennel scene of sleeping pups, 
 a truant fisher-boy, a howling, cowering, chained Newfoundland 
 dog and a goat rampant on a field belligerent. But for all the 
 bewildering fascinations about him everywhere, the charm of 
 the presence of the presiding genius of the place is always fore 
 most in the interest of the visitor. 
 
 Here it was, down at "the pink edge of the day" that I 
 gave a loathful farewell to the happy house "The Jester" 
 trying to be serious "The Prince" indiscriminately shaking 
 hands with everybody, and "Her Little Serene Highness" with 
 her patient eyes waiting upon the fuller glory of the sunset. 
 
 That winter was perhaps one of the bitterest and 
 saddest of his experience, and yet, notwithstanding it 
 all, he did his work for the public courageously and with 
 apparent joy. But much of his real heart is revealed 
 by a letter to his father written February 8, 1884: 
 
 The rain it raineth every day, and although we have no 
 such floods as the Ohio rejoiceth in, yet the Lancaster pike is 
 as a swamp and the streets of Ardmore are swamps. Happy 
 is the man whose boots reach to his neck and thrice happy is 
 he who doesn t have to go out doors at all. 
 
 We have given Robbie s goat to the parson s boys. The 
 result is that the parson has only one night-shirt left, and it 
 consists simply of a collar band and one sleeve. There is, 
 about the appetite of a goat, a homely simplicity and an unos 
 tentatious taste that is charming to contemplate in this age of 
 luxury and effeminate delicacy, and the spectacle of a hungry 
 and not too fastidious goat, making a frugal but substantial 
 meal off the scantily furnished clothes line of a Baptist parson, 
 is a picture of homely comfort and domestic enjoyment upon 
 which the poets love to dwell and which artists delight to spread 
 upon the glowing canvas. But I digress. 
 
 Carrie is very low. She is weaker and is suffering more, 
 than for years past. Since the first of December she has only 
 been down stairs twice. Now, she lies in her invalid chair all 
 
 195 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 day long in my den, where I can be near her all the time, 
 because I have been at home a week, and may not go out to 
 lecture any more this winter. But the sunlight of Beulah is 
 shining on her soul, and her peace and trust is beautiful to see. 
 We hope for returning strength with the spring time, yet the 
 struggle just now is painful it is terrible. 
 
 Last Sabbath afternoon, Mr. Wiley, our pastor, two of the 
 deacons and a number of members of the Church came to 
 Carrie s room and the ordinance of the Lord s supper was 
 administered there. It was a scene most impressive and 
 touching, and I cannot tell you how profoundly the patient 
 little sufferer enjoyed the privilege of sitting at the table of 
 the Master whom she has served so gently and lovingly, in the 
 shadowed paths of suffering. 
 
 And now, I wish you would ask for letters of dismission 
 from the Burlington Church for Carrie and me, to unite with the 
 Lower Merion Baptist Church, at Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. 
 
 We have deferred this so long, because our membership 
 with the First Church of Burlington has been and is a very 
 tender tie, that holds us very strongly to a city and a church 
 very dear to us. In the church to which we now say good-bye, 
 we have met friends dearer to us than we can tell. We have 
 formed friendships that will last beyond the grave. In our 
 troubles, loving hearts and hands ministered to us. In all 
 Carrie s affliction, there was a path worn from the door of the 
 church to our own threshold and to her bedside, by the coming 
 and going of brethren and sisters, who were brothers and sisters 
 in name, in heart and in deed. From the pulpit and the choir, 
 comfort of psalm and sermon have come creeping into our 
 hearts. From the pews, voices we can never forget have plead 
 for our strength and comfort at a throne of grace. Hands 
 have clasped ours in the crowded aisles, with a loving and 
 hopeful grasp that caught hold upon our hearts. So dear the 
 old church has been and is to us, so dear all its memories and 
 the names of our brethren and sisters there, that it is more than 
 a passing pang for us to say good-bye, and take up the Master s 
 work in another part of His vineyard. In all the years wherein 
 we sat at the table of our Lord with the dear family of the old 
 church, we can recall not one hour that is not sanctified to us 
 by beautiful and blessed memories; not a harsh word, not a 
 196 
 
BREAKING TIES 
 
 cold hand, not one averted look. "Whatsoever things are true, 
 whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, what 
 soever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatso 
 ever things are of good report," all these things go to make up 
 our memories of our connection with the Burlington Church. 
 Always we will carry a love for it in our hearts, we will think 
 of it when we pray, and it can never be the less dear to us, 
 because the outward form of membership is dissolved. 
 
 But here is our home, and here is our work, and here there 
 fore is the church with which we should walk, and labor and 
 take counsel. And here may the prayers and love of the old 
 friends strengthen us in the new fields, and most earnestly do 
 we say "God bless you" as regretfully we say "Good-bye". 
 
 In his diary late in 1884 appears the following entry, 
 as though he had desired to set down for himself his 
 vivid recollections of Carrie s last days: 
 
 Carrie came upstairs early in December, in the first week. 
 On Christmas I carried her downstairs to dinner. Once again 
 I carried her down in January. She never went into the parlor 
 after she came upstairs. Our anniversary dinner, March 4, 
 1884, we ate in her room. While upstairs she sat in the den 
 all the time while I was away. 
 
 After I came home, for a few weeks she insisted on occupy 
 ing the guest chamber in the morning to avoid disturbing me, 
 but about the third or fourth week in March I persuaded her 
 to stay in the den all the time. She never left the dear, cheery 
 old room again until about 4 o clock Sunday afternoon, May 
 llth, when she said she would have to give up and go to bed. 
 She said good-bye to the den so tenderly and sweetly as she 
 passed out, saying she would never see it again, and she never 
 did. On Saturday, May 24th, Dora and I lifted her out of 
 bed alone and for the last time. She said we lifted her so com 
 fortably and did not hurt her at all. While her bed was being 
 made up she admired the maples in the front yard. That 
 night Dora slept and watched with her. Sunday night I took 
 Dora s place, and Monday morning at 7.15 God took her. 
 
 Sunday, May 18th, in the afternoon she sang "I am a 
 Pilgrim" with Robbie and me. About the middle of the week 
 
 197 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 she sang one verse of it with me, but was too exhausted to sing 
 any more until her pilgrimage closed. 
 
 It was 4 o clock Thursday, May 29th, when the casket was 
 placed in the vault. Tuesday, June 10th, Dea. Lee, Dr, McL., 
 Mr. Pearce and I carried her to her bed in the lot, and at 3.45 
 we looked down at the pretty casket flower covered, and said 
 good-bye. We saw her peaceful, beautiful face Monday and 
 again Tuesday. 
 
 His subsequent life at Ardmore was simple, and he 
 joined with affection and interest with the wholesome 
 and home-loving folk of that little community in their 
 social and church life. His friend, Dr. H. A. Arnold, 
 writes of his place in the village life: 
 
 The old Lower Merion Baptist Church received Robert J. 
 Burdette into its membership very soon after his removal to 
 Ardmore. After a short residence in Ardmore he removed to 
 Bryn Mawr, where proximity enabled him to enter fully into 
 church activities. Giving of his time and ability to the various 
 phases of home church work, he had a wider vision, saw a 
 Macedonian field, and heard an unuttered call from Merion 
 Square unuttered because in our humbleness we could not 
 hope for spiritual ministrations other than the Sunday School 
 sessions, the after session services conducted once a month by 
 the pastor, and the Friday evening prayer meeting. The suc 
 cess attending these activities emboldened us to build a very 
 pretty stone chapel. In its tower hung a sweet-toned memorial 
 bell, the gift of Brother Burdette. 
 
 His interest in our work grew as he became better ac 
 quainted, and we often had his very welcome presence at 
 prayer meetings and special services; in fact his ministrations 
 became so constant that he jokingly styled himself our pastor. 
 
 He was a most welcome speaker at our anniversary, Christ 
 mas, Easter and other special services, and occupied the pulpit 
 so frequently that he felt thoroughly at home there, so much so 
 that he offered himself as preacher for Sunday evening services 
 if we desired to hold them. Gratefully accepting the mag 
 nanimous offer, regular services were instituted, and our 
 preacher traveled many miles returning home, when on lecture 
 198 
 
BREAKING TIES 
 
 tours, to keep his preaching appointment. Bearing us in mind, 
 when away, he would send word by mail announcing subject 
 and hymns selected for the services the following Sunday night. 
 
 During this time he brightened our homes many times by 
 pastoral (?) calls. The memory of these home visitations is 
 still fresh notwithstanding the lapse of years; and sermon 
 notes catching the brilliant gems of thought and language are 
 still in my possession, reminders of services wherein we all sat 
 enraptured by his eloquence and pathos. 
 
 Without realizing it, he had entered a training school of 
 the Father s providing, wherein he might be prepared for the 
 greater, better work ahead, the crowning glory of his life. 
 
 In 1890 a Sunday School in Ardmore became a necessity, 
 and in one year it outgrew its rented quarters and demanded a 
 building of its own. To start a building fund he offered us a 
 lecture. Notwithstanding a most unfavorable night we real 
 ized more than one hundred dollars with which to start our 
 fund. We soon erected the building that in a few more years 
 became the home of the First Baptist Church of Ardmore. 
 
 He was ever a friend of this new cause, and we had his 
 encouraging presence and ministrations on numerous occasions. 
 These labors, like those at Merion Square, were labors of love, 
 and were requited only by gratitude and affection. All efforts 
 looking toward remuneration were kindly, yet firmly repulsed, 
 and the only occasion when our appreciation assumed a tangi 
 ble form was at one of our Sunday School anniversaries at 
 Merion Square, when we surprised him by the gift of a watch 
 and chain. Tears filled his eyes as he responded in language 
 that expressed heartfelt emotions. 
 
 In his work among us he merited the plaudit "inasmuch 
 as ye did it unto the least of these my brethren, ye did it 
 unto me". 
 
 It was indeed an humble work, but it was the prelude to 
 the greater work the Master had for him in the beautiful 
 summer land of everblooming flowers, where he spent the sun 
 set of a life full of golden deeds. 
 
 His works do follow him. 
 
 After twelve years of newspaper work with the 
 Hawk-Eye, he resigned from that paper in the same 
 
 199 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 year his wife died, 1884. In the course of his life at 
 Ardmore he had formed newspaper and syndicate 
 connections that made considerable demands upon 
 his time. He worked indefatigably and consistently 
 while at home, entering his "den" early in the morn 
 ing and applying himself closely until noon or later. 
 
 He contributed to the Brooklyn Eagle, following 
 the death of the brilliant humorist, Stanley Huntley, 
 and "the Burdette letter" was a feature of the Eagle 
 for many years. As usual, it was a potpourri of political 
 comment, humorous and philosophical paragraphs, 
 with occasional verses. 
 
 He wrote the Hawk-Eye, tendering his resignation, 
 upon which the Hawk-Eye made this comment: 
 
 The Hawk-Eye was Mr. Burdette s opportunity. It was 
 the avenue by which he was introduced to the American public 
 and his genial, kindly, sparkling and unique humor was first 
 revealed. Mr. Burdette was also the Hawk-Eye s most valued 
 attache". Through the sparkling vivacity and pure and infec 
 tious wit with which he enlivened its columns, the Hawk-Eye 
 was given an open sesame to thousands of homes in every 
 state and territory of the United States, through all the prov 
 inces of Canada, in England, France and Australia. 
 
 It will not be possible, perhaps, to fully supply his place. 
 His humor is as unique as it is innocent, as bright as it is pure; 
 it invades every phase of human life, it colors all events, 
 political or social, with its own radiance; it finds appreciation 
 in every walk in life; it is enjoyed by the humblest, and is 
 relished by the most refined; it never descends to the gross and 
 coarse, but is always high in its moral tone, pure in its social 
 allusions and amuses without wounding. 
 
 For several years Mr. Burdette s career has been drifting 
 away from newspaper work and he only consented to retain 
 his connection with the Hawk-Eye because of the identity of 
 its growth with his. It is not easy for him now to say "adieu" 
 and it is not easy for the management or his associates editori 
 ally to bid farewell to one who is remembered as the light of 
 200 
 
BREAKING TIES 
 
 the sanctum when he was daily at his desk. From the "devil" 
 in the composing room and the carriers in the press room to the 
 editor-in-chief and manager, every employee or attache yielded 
 cordial friendship to Robert J. Burdette which will continue 
 as personal as it was voluntary. The Hawk-Eye will still 
 regard his success as its own and will take the same pride in 
 his literary achievements as though he continued identified 
 with its own prosperity. 
 
 Running through all his records there was always 
 an indication of some form of religious observance of 
 the Sabbath under all conditions, as this excerpt, 
 written on the eve of leaving Ardmore, shows: 
 
 The last Sunday in the "den" in "Doubting Castle", we 
 arose at eight, wearied with packing all Saturday. We did 
 not go to church. After prayers and a page from " Morning by 
 Morning ", we sat in the den. Robbie read " Examiner Stories " 
 and the Sunday School lessons in the National Baptist aloud, 
 all other books having been taken from the den. Then we 
 read a sermon by Spurgeon from Romans, 15, 30 to 33. In the 
 morning we stood a while on the back porch, looked at the 
 lawn; in the evening we chatted in the den of the possibili 
 ties of the new home. 
 
 201 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 THE strain of the lecture platform began to tell 
 upon Mr. Burdette. On several occasions he 
 declared his intention to forsake the platform 
 for the quieter life of the country gentleman, 
 engaged solely with literature, but often the importuni 
 ties of the bureaus caused him to break his resolution. 
 It was but natural that he should at last wish to 
 leave Ardmore and " Doubting Castle", which was his 
 rather pathetic designation of the cottage in which he 
 had seen so much of distress and sorrow, and where he 
 had said his last good-bye to the invalid wife. He 
 remained there until March, 1886, and early in the 
 summer, with "Dedie" (Miss Garrett) and Robin, who 
 was then nine years of age, he went to the Adirondacks 
 to seek nature s best restorative. It was in that summer 
 that he filled a church pulpit for the first time, although 
 he had been neither licensed nor ordained as a minister. 
 Possibly his filling of the pulpit was somewhat in self- 
 defense, for on Sunday, June 20th, an entry in his 
 diary reads: 
 
 Drove to the Baptist Church and heard the awfullest sing 
 ing and oh! the awfullest preaching. The sermon was one of 
 Spurgeon s greatest, but the duffer who stole it murdered it. 
 It was terrible. We will never go again. 
 
 Evidently he reconsidered his determination, and 
 consented himself to fill the pulpit, for on Saturday, 
 July 10th, occurs the following entry: 
 
 Rainy morning; terrific thunderstorm last night. Tents 
 dry as powder; rain held up a little after breakfast. We drove 
 
 202 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE IN BRYN MAWR DAYS 
 
ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 to North Creek, shopped, dined at the American, and returned 
 home, reaching the tents at 6 P. M. Got to bed late. Stayed 
 up after supper and wrote my two sermons. 
 
 That summer, he always insisted, was one of the 
 most important in his life. The freedom from the 
 responsibilities and cares of the platform, the woods 
 and the out-of-doors, and the evident earnestness with 
 which the neighborhood people received his ministry, 
 led him to consider seriously the ministry as his real 
 life s work, and it is significant that a year or so later 
 he was licensed to preach by the little Lower Merion 
 Church at Bryn Mawr. 
 
 There were other joys in that summer, and notable 
 was the close companionship which always existed 
 between him and his son. An entry in his diary in 
 July says: 
 
 Robbie and I went a-fishing. Took 58 trout, most of them 
 very nice ones. Robbie fell through a hole in the ground into 
 the brook. Brooks in this country have a way of wandering 
 around underground in most unexpected places, and the crust 
 is so thin that anyone could fall through it anywhere. 
 
 His work for the Eagle occupied him for a part of 
 the time he gave to writing, and what with the caring 
 for his camp establishment, the making of rustic furni 
 ture, the gathering of wild strawberries, and tramping 
 through the woods and by the brooks, it was a joyous 
 summer in many ways. His ministry continued in the 
 church until camp was broken in September, and at 
 that time those to whom he had preached gathered to 
 bid him good-bye, and to make him a substantial 
 offering of money for his services. He took from it one 
 silver dollar as a memento, and the balance he asked 
 to be returned to the donors, or expended in some cause 
 they might approve. 
 
 203 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 His own account of the gradual change in his views 
 with reference to humor as expressed from the platform, 
 and what he felt to be the greater field of ministerial 
 work, was given long afterward, and contains the pic 
 ture of that summer in the mountains and the effect 
 of that simple ministry upon his beliefs: 
 
 I have read some lasting sermons by Tom Hood and 
 Charles Lamb and Oliver Wendell Holmes and I have seen 
 Mr. Beecher s congregation smile, to say the least. I think 
 Gough was a pretty good preacher, but he has made me laugh 
 many a time. Speaking to a class of theological students, Mr. 
 Beecher once said, replying to the question "whether it was 
 proper to say anything in a sermon that would make people 
 laugh?" 
 
 "Never turn aside from a laugh any more than you would 
 from a cry. Go ahead on your Master s business, and do it 
 well. And remember this, that every faculty in you was 
 placed there by the dear Lord God for His service. Never try 
 to raise a laugh for a laugh s sake, or to make merry as a piece 
 of sensationalism when you are preaching on solemn things. 
 But if mirth comes up naturally do not stifle it. If when you 
 are arguing any question the thing comes upon you so that you 
 see the point in a ludicrous light you can sometimes flash it 
 at your audience and accomplish at a stroke what you were 
 seeking to do by a long train of argument, and that is entirely 
 allowable. In such a case do not attempt to suppress laughter. 
 It is a part of the nature God gave us and which we can use 
 in his service. When you are fighting the devil shoot him with 
 anything." 
 
 As a matter of fact, my sermons are anything but humorous. 
 I have far less liberty in that direction than have other 
 preachers. If I told one funny story in the pulpit it would be 
 magnified into a score. When I was pastor of the First Presby- 
 byterian Church, in Pasadena, it was recurrently reported by 
 some people who never went to that church that any time you 
 went by that Presbyterian Church during the hour of service 
 you could hear the people clapping hands and roaring with 
 laughter at my jokes. 
 204 
 
ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 There wasn t a syllable of truth in it, but such things have 
 a sobering effect on me. I don t dare to be so funny in the 
 pulpit as many of my ministerial brethren. And this is a 
 grievous disappointment to some of my hearers. 
 
 My first pastorate was in the State of New York, in the 
 summer of 1885. I was pastor of a Baptist Church, at " Pond 
 13 ", in Warren County. I was camping in the woods up in 
 that country when I received my "call". The people came to 
 me and said they had no pastor, would I preach for them? I 
 would and did. It surely was a country pastorate. 
 
 I was camping on the farm of Mr. Bennett and he drove 
 me to service, about four or five miles, I think, every Sunday. 
 When I returned to Philadelphia, in October, they offered me 
 most generous pay for my poor services. I kept one big silver 
 dollar, and gave back the rest of the money. I had received 
 from those warm-hearted people more than any money could 
 measure. 
 
 I have been preaching ever since, a year or two, in 1891-2, 
 as assistant pastor of the Lower Merion Baptist Church, Bryn 
 Mawr, Pa., during the pastorate of the Rev. B. MacMacklin, 
 now of Philadelphia. In 1888 that church licensed me to preach. 
 
 During my lecture seasons, which last from October to 
 May and carry me all over the United States, I have always 
 preached every Sunday so that my "one day pastorates" are 
 scattered over this country from Maine to Texas. You might 
 have heard me when I preached in Madison Avenue Baptist 
 Church, New York City, some time in 1893, I think. 
 
 In fact, I don t see how you can have missed hearing me 
 some Sunday during the last eighteen years. In March, 1898, 
 I accepted a call as supply for the First Presbyterian Church 
 of Pasadena, CaL, and continued as acting pastor "stated 
 supply", the Presbyterians call it for a little over a year. In 
 all that time I remained a Baptist and they continued to be 
 Presbyterians. Nothing separated us but the baptistry. And 
 if ever I find sweeter, more lovable people I will have to go to 
 heaven to look for them. 
 
 At the close of that pastorate I once more resumed my lec 
 ture work, preached once or twice a week from Dan to Beer- 
 sheba, returned home and accepted the call to the pastorate of 
 the Temple Baptist Church, of Los Angeles. 
 
 205 
 
ROBERT J. BTJRDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Receiving a questionnaire from a brother minister 
 concerning missions, Mr. Burdette answered it very 
 fully, by saying: 
 
 I hardly know how to answer your letter. I am a very 
 young pastor. I was ordained less than five years ago and this 
 is my first regular pastorate. My friends are kind enough to 
 tell me, with charming frankness, that I have no executive 
 ability whatever, that I am a man without methods and without 
 system. I plead guilty to all those charges. 
 
 I attribute everything that Temple Church has done or 
 does in all lines of Christian activity to the spirit of the prayer- 
 meeting, which is the great, strong meeting of the church and 
 is also conducted by its method-less pastor without any system. 
 I would excommunicate anybody who suggested a series of 
 prayer-meeting topics running through the year. Neither the 
 church nor myself know longer than a week in advance what 
 we are going to talk about and pray about at the next meeting, 
 and not infrequently the announced topic is ignored utterly 
 after its announcement. 
 
 I came to the church without any seminary training and 
 without any experience in leading a church. When I was 
 ordained someone asked one of my deacons whether his pastor 
 knew any theology. "Oh," he said, apologetically, "he knows 
 a little, but not enough to hurt his preaching." I had one 
 qualification for the ministry. All my life I have been intensely 
 fond of people, and I told the flock that if they would only love 
 one another and their pastor, I would never ask anything else 
 of them. They fell in with the idea, and every time the pastor 
 asks them for money for any cause whatever, they respond 
 cheerfully and lovingly. 
 
 When the time comes round for the annual missionary 
 sermon, I sigh in heaviness of spirit and gird up my intellectual 
 and spiritual loins and sit down to one of the burdens of the 
 year, "the preparation of a missionary sermon". The other 
 twenty-five or thirty or forty missionary sermons which I 
 preach out of the joy and love and the hope of my heart, during 
 the year, are never burdens to me, and they are the ones that 
 bring the money in spite of the annual missionary sermon. I 
 always make the "appeal" as we call it, myself, because I know 
 
 206 
 
ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 my people better and if I am not to hurt anybody s feelings I 
 know when to stop. So many times, when I have been an 
 onlooker in other churches, I have seen the dollars fall out of 
 the basket by the hundred, scooped out by the fatal " one word 
 more" and "another thought". 
 
 The Temple is a missionary church, ardently, enthusias 
 tically so. I have observed as each cause is presented that it 
 is considered "the most vitally important of all missionary 
 causes", and it is always a great joy to me to find that we are 
 invariably disappointed with the smallness of our offering. 
 This makes us hopeful and zealous for the next year. 
 
 If I have not conveyed to you in this letter how little I 
 know, say so, and I will write a longer one which will convince 
 you that I know less than nothing. 
 
 With pleasant memories of good old days and dear old 
 friends, of whom you are always One (with a capital 0). 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 Again Mr. Burdette wrote: 
 
 To return to the question, " How does it feel to turn from 
 humorist to preacher?" Well, the transition has been so 
 gradual, extending over a period of eighteen years of preaching 
 and writing and lecturing, that the shock isn t very apparent. 
 Besides, it has been up hill all the way. 
 
 I have seen it stated that I "wearied of the strenuous life 
 of the lecture field and sought ease in the pastorate". Well, 
 I have tried both. If I want an easy, lazy time I would con 
 tinue to roam around the country with half a dozen lectures, 
 each one so old that it will say itself, after you get it started, 
 and change my audience every day. 
 
 Intellectually, popular lecturing is the laziest occupation 
 on earth, next after acting, of course. But to go into the 
 pastorate, to face two fresh sermons every week, with all 
 manner of unexpected addresses coming in to fill up the time, 
 in this day of intellectual activity and alertness, when the con 
 gregation demands that every sermon shall be the best, the 
 man who seeks the pastorate for a vacation will find far more 
 quiet and ease and meditative restfulness in falling down stairs 
 with a kitchen stove or dodging automobiles on racing day. 
 
 207 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Upon his return from the sojourn in the Adirondacks 
 there were intervals of boarding, lecturing and house- 
 
 (3-cuy c^^sir&t yvis 
 
 A CHARACTERISTIC " GOOD-BYE " FROM ROBERT J. BURDETTE 
 
 hunting, for the atmosphere of "Doubting Castle", 
 with, its environment of reflection, was depressing to 
 
 208 
 
ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 him, and in the following year he settled in the adjoining 
 village of Bryn Mawr, where for more than ten years 
 he made his home, the house in which he lived being 
 affectionately designated as "Robin s Nest". 
 
 From here, during those days, he made his pilgrim 
 ages in the lecture season, and here he did his literary 
 work and entered again into the life of the community. 
 He made his first literary connection there with Edward 
 W. Bok, then at the head of the Bok Syndicate Press, 
 and later editor of the Ladies Home Journal, and he 
 went with Bok from the columns of the syndicate 
 occasionally into the columns of the Ladies Home 
 Journal. 
 
 A letter early in their acquaintance replying to a 
 request from Mr. Bok for copy is typical: 
 
 I have read your letter with great pain, and serious con 
 cern. I am grieved to see that you at your early age, are 
 becoming avaricious. Oh, Edward, the love of money is one 
 of the roots of evil, and I mourn to see a young man begin to 
 root early. Oh, conquer this measureless, grasping greed that 
 is absorbing your young life. Do not want all the money there 
 is going; let me have a scoop at it now and then. 
 
 Well, I ll tell you; I am not greedy myself; I only want 
 all I can get. I ll go you on your proposition; $40 a week for 
 me (and Jay Gould s income for you) and I will write for the 
 Eagle just as at present, but no more; and will write for no 
 other newspapers, save through your management; and will 
 send you anywhere from 2500 to 4000 words a week, in the form 
 of letters or sketches as you wish; "was you thinkin" at all 
 of poetry? It would come dearer, for when a person comes to 
 grind off poetry night after night, it is but right he should expect 
 to be paid for its weakening effect on the mind. But not being 
 a regular poetry professional, I should be loath to engage 
 myself for that; and therefore when I drop into poetry, I 
 should ask to be considered "so fur in the light of a friend". 
 
 Again warning you to conquer the growing spirit of avarice, 
 which I fear is marking you for its own, dear Edward, I am. 
 u 209 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 In this unusual form Mr. Burdette once sent an 
 invitation to Mr. Quimby to visit him: 
 
 DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 
 July 4th, 1894. 
 
 When, in the course of Human Events, it becomes necessary 
 for the people of the United States to smell gunpowder and 
 burning paper and punk and dust all the day long; to catch 
 rocket sticks in their eyes, to step on exploding torpedoes, to 
 dodge runaway horses, to trail after processions, to listen to 
 inaudible orations, and to perform various acts of martyrdom 
 to show their love of country, a decent respect for their own 
 comfort requires that they should declare their love of a country 
 by fleeing to the country; 
 
 We hold that all men are created tolerably equal; that they 
 are endowed with certain inalienable rights, each of which 
 carries with it its complemental left; that certain specified 
 rights have descended to and should be enjoyed by the Quimby 
 family especially, among which is the Right and Duty 
 
 To board certain street cars and railway trains as may 
 best suit their convenience at an early hour on the morning of 
 July Fourth, A. D. 1894, and proceed with all careful diligence 
 to the Suburban Station of Bryn Mawr, there to rendezvous at 
 the habitation of one or two Robert J. Burdette, senior and 
 junior, and Miss Dora H. Garrett, on Penn Street, known on 
 old maps as Fisher s Road, there to possess themselves of the 
 lawn, the piazza, and the castle, from turret to foundation 
 stone, until the shades of night shall wrap the globe in three-ply 
 darkness. 
 
 See that you fail not at your peril. 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 In June, 1891, not long after the arrival of 
 "Dappy", as he affectionately called his father, he 
 wrote to his sister Mollie: 
 
 The weather is cool. Father is greatly depressed; he has 
 had a hen on 13 duck eggs for about a month or less, and at 
 last, with a great flourish of cackling trumpets from all the other 
 denizens of Crocus Hall, and much dubious clucking on the 
 
 210 
 
ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 part of the astonished step-mother, she has come off with one (1) 
 to wit, one duck. He seems kind of lost among the chicks, 
 and goes around whistling through his nose in a shrill and lone 
 some manner. Truly, when a hen suspends publication of 
 diurnal eggs and goes into retirement on a secluded nest in a 
 close and ill-ventilated apartment for single hens, she knows 
 not what that day three weeks may bring forth. 
 
 We are all in average health. Father is rapidly becoming 
 acquainted in Bryn Mawr. He knows everybody in the 
 village by sight and name. At first this might seem incredible 
 to you, but the mystery is made somewhat clearer when you 
 are informed, what you have possibly surmised, that he bows 
 politely and speaks courteously to everybody, which accounts 
 for the slight acquaintance, and calls everybody Fisher, except 
 those whom he accosts as "Richards", and a very few select 
 acquaintances 25 or 30 who are graven on the tablets of his 
 friendship as the "Beveridges". This kind of simplifies the 
 nomenclature of a very large and constantly increasing circle 
 of acquaintances. I might mention that he has recently 
 formed the acquaintance of a most charming lady, whom he 
 calls Mrs. Morton. She is the wife of the Rev. James Haugh- 
 ton, our neighbor, rector of the Episcopal Church of the 
 Redeemer. 
 
 To his sister he wrote intimately of the family life, 
 revealing, as in many other ways, how the little inci 
 dents made up his life: 
 
 Notwithstanding the sultry weather, which is not sultry 
 but quite contrary, which it is cool enough in the shade when 
 the wind blows, father is sort of miserable from a heavy cold 
 which the same he sits in the cool and drafty places on the 
 piazza and lets the wind blow on his head without any hat on, 
 no wonder he takes cold and we know it is nobody s fault but 
 his own for he has a brand new hat which came home Saturday 
 night at 9 o clock and was worn all through the hen house and 
 the chicken yard just prior to being worn to church Sunday 
 morning which Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed in 
 a hat like that or wouldn t have been if we hadn t captured 
 it in time and brushed it off not Solomon but father. 
 
 211 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Father has been elected Superintendent of Crocus Hall 
 (it is suspected that he secretly voted for himself) without a 
 dissenting voice and has now on his hand a large contract to 
 rear chickens and keep the table supplied with fresh eggs. 
 Nobody else is permitted to interfere with the hens. They 
 all like the new Superintendent very much indeed and whenever 
 a hen evolves a Negg, she lifts up her voice and calls for him 
 " Cut-cut-cut-cut-ca-DAP-py ! " 
 
 Robbie s schol with another o in it, closed iast Friday and 
 the Junior acquitted himself very creditably indeed in a declama 
 tion "Thoughts for the Discouraged Farmer". There were 
 a number of other declamations, also, but nothing worth listen 
 ing to after that. The little man is very ambitious and is 
 going to keep up his studies all summer, with his father for 
 tutor. It is his own idea, and he went to work in solid earnest 
 this morning. 
 
 Bryn Mawr church is stili pastorless. Father leads the 
 prayer meetings I think the people will be loath to see him 
 relinquish the desk after we get a pastor. It is a delight to 
 our souls we of the household, to see him, after being so long 
 unappreciated by the Burlington church, taken up with such 
 cordial, earnest, sincere appreciation here in the shadow of 
 Philadelphia, and fairly compelled to take the place which 
 belongs to him. You would think he was the senior deacon of 
 the church. We are going to have him preach over at Merion 
 Square in two weeks I said Merion Square and I meant it, 
 and I am going to stick to it and then I suppose they will 
 have no use for anyone else over there. 
 
 I have the lov-liest roses this summer you ever saw. I 
 have also about 9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 rose bugs. 
 Help yourself. They ate the E out of loveliest. Only it wasn t 
 that kind of an e. 
 
 Dora complains of feeling a little better. She has not been 
 dangerously ill, but only slimpsey. Father seems feeble, except 
 when he sneezes; then he blows the vines down. Robbie and 
 I are quite chirk. So no more at present. With much love 
 from all of us. 
 
 ROB. 
 
 Always there was the deepest and tenaerest affec 
 tion and reverence for his father underneath all the 
 212 
 
ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 bubbling effervescence of his humorous descriptions. 
 This is an extract from a letter in November, 1891: 
 
 Did I tell you I don t believe I did something so sweet 
 and pathetic. The other evening, when the sun was gone and 
 before the lamps were lighted, I was busy at something in the 
 music room. Father was sitting in a "snug harbor" he has 
 taken to himself; the bay window in the dining room, you 
 remember it; looks out on the Mather place and the Fisher 
 homestead. It s handy for father, as he is in and out all day, 
 and doesn t like to climb the stairs to the den too often. Dora 
 has furnished the bay window with a pretty wicker table with 
 shelf for his books, a reading rack from my office, chair, rocker, 
 etc., and it is the coziest sort of a corner. Well, he was rocking 
 there after the twilight hid the lines in Armitage s " History of 
 the Baptists", and I heard him singing. The old baby songs, 
 the old hymn tunes, not to the words of the Hymnal, but the 
 "Bye, oh baby, bye, oh bye", I peeped out to see him. The 
 dear old figure; his arms folded on his breast; the long silver 
 hair falling on his shoulders, the snowy beard, whiter than 
 ever in the November twilight, a little quiver in the voice as 
 he sat, looking out at the fading landscape, singing again to 
 the children grown into manhood and womanhood, some of 
 them singing to children of their own. Nothing could be 
 sweeter or more touching. A gentle, loving, sweet old man. 
 
 In an interval, when the condition of his throat sent 
 him home from lecturing, he wrote: 
 
 I am home also, not because I want to be, but because I 
 have to be. Been down in West Virginia; rasped my voice to 
 pieces, finally lost it; got caught in the floods; came home 
 voiceless; medical examination; appalled to learn that all the 
 latin parts of my throat are congested, in addition to which, 
 I have acute inflammation of some things I never knew were 
 in my neck at all. Don t know how they got there, either, 
 "less n dey done crawl up my trouser laig"; am laid off the 
 platform for a week or ten days, but hope and expect to resume 
 work then. 
 
 It was all a simple, peaceful, ideal kind of living, 
 those summer days at Bryn Mawr. Mollie was taken 
 
 213 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 suddenly and seriously ill in the fall of 1891, and a letter 
 from the brother is alive with tender sympathy and 
 colored with his always ready humor, showing the quick 
 transition of his mind from the humorous to the 
 genuinely serious point of view: 
 
 What a heartless old world it is, anyhow. How little do 
 we care for one another. Yesterday, while you lay in what 
 pain and suffering we do not know, we were out in the woods 
 with Dora Weston, gathering nuts. Your brother Robert was 
 high up in a swaying hickory tree, mauling the branches with 
 a club; far down below, Dora Garrett and Dora Weston were 
 prowling through the woods, gathering shellbarks and braiding 
 their gowns with arabesque patterns of "beggar s lice" and in 
 the clear swift flowing Ithan Creek, your father, with his noble 
 old head crowned with long flowing silver locks, had his panta 
 loons rolled up to his knees, and was wading around, much as 
 his daughter Mary waded in the mountain brook up the Matil- 
 laja canon. This morning he said at the breakfast table, that 
 "the sudden change in the weather last night had given him 
 a cold". Some foolish person suggested that wading in the 
 creek in October might have had something to do with it. The 
 "poof!" of scorn which greeted the silly suggestion fairly made 
 the white beard curl. He said "that wade did him good; if 
 he was where he could take one every day he would never have 
 a cold". We brought home a wagon load of shellbarks, butter 
 nuts, walnuts, and I think some 15 or 20 chestnuts, some with 
 worms in, and a few 5 or 6 maybe, without. That s about 
 the usual proportion. 
 
 But we didn t forget you, dear, if we were climbing and 
 wading. A postal from Mrs. Collette met us on our way out, 
 and assured us that you were quite encouraged concerning 
 yourself. And this had to content us through the day, while 
 we wait for the next word by this morning s mail. We do hope 
 you are growing better all the time. And that other people 
 are encouraged as well as yourself. 
 
 And for a little time, now, good-bye. God bless and keep 
 you. So full of manifold trials have the days of your pilgrimage 
 been surely if the sufferings of this present time are not 
 worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed 
 214 
 
ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 in us, there must be abundance of glory in store for you. Surely 
 you can rest your head and heart on this pillow " He knoweth 
 the way that I take; when He hath tried me, I shall come 
 forth as gold. My foot hath held His steps, His way have I 
 kept, and not declined." 
 
 Love and hope and prayers from all of us. Looking for 
 good news from you every day. 
 
 A characteristic letter is from the Tremont House 
 in Boston in January of the following year: 
 
 Lectured in old Salem Wednesday night, where they used 
 to burn the witches. Funny hall. Amphitheatre, like lecture 
 room in medical college, lecturer stands at bottom of cistern, 
 people sit all around him. Two or three good buggy top hats 
 shut out three-fifths of the audience. About five minutes 
 after lecture began, woman had a fit. Five or six men carried 
 her out with her feet in the air. Then at the close of lecture 
 man read a dispatch announcing verdict in Guiteau case. 
 Crowd cheered and clapped their hands. So with fit at one 
 end and hanging at other, humorous lecture passed off very 
 cheerfully indeed. 
 
 And in another letter he pays this tribute to 
 "Dedie": 
 
 What the Nest would do without Dora to flutter and hover 
 and brood over it, I don t know. Little would it avail old 
 Robin to fly across the country, twittering from platform to 
 platform and bringing home "grub" in his chattering bill, if 
 there were no Dora to keep the Nest in order and take care of 
 three helpless boys "aging" from the little man of 14 to the 
 grand-sire of 71. ... 
 
 In summing up his joys in work and play near the 
 close of his Bryn Mawr life, and after twenty-five years 
 of newspaper work, he gives this account of himself: 
 
 I am an early riser. Six o clock sees me reluctantly crawl 
 ing out of a bed where I have been utterly unconscious for 
 eight hours. "Six o clock isn t early?" Well, any man who 
 is in the habit of rising earlier than that, unless the house is on 
 
 215 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 fire, should consult a physician. Before breakfast, I take a 
 short walk, say to the nearest apple or pear tree, if the fruit is 
 in season. That is about forty-five feet from the door. That 
 is all the exercise I take before breakfast. If I had to walk 
 a mile to breakfast I would simply omit the cheery meal of 
 incense breathing morn, that s all. 
 
 I do not even read the morning paper till breakfast is 
 served; then it is read aloud to the family with interlineations 
 and running comments which the audience has long since 
 learned to recognize and interpret. It is rather confusing, 
 however, to guests who happen to be present, and who are 
 sometimes observed during the day to be searching the paper 
 for personal notices and little items of home news that are 
 only visible through the family spectacles. From eight o clock 
 until one, I am locked in my den, doing with my might what 
 my hand findeth to do. During these hours I am a dead man, 
 so far as callers are concerned. Not even a card is slipped 
 under the den door. Nobody is permitted to help me waste a 
 minute of my work time. 
 
 In the afternoon, if at the right time of the year, I move my 
 shrubbery for the season. You can t tell where you want a 
 bush or tree until you have watched it for two or three years. 
 "Can t, hey?" I tell you, I have transplanted fruit trees four 
 years old, with my own hands. Did they live? Of course. 
 They wouldn t have survived, but that a neighbor or two came 
 along and told me they would die. That settled it. I sat up 
 nights with those trees, watered them with my tears and held 
 them in my arms when they seemed restless and feverish, and 
 I am eating pears and apples from them in these fruitful, 
 happy days. There isn t a fruit tree on my little acre that 
 hasn t been condemned to death half a dozen times by some 
 man who knew it all. I am the most easy-going, easily-ruled, 
 easily-led man on this planet. But if there is anything in life 
 I do enjoy, and love to do, it is to have some man come along 
 and tell me I can t do a certain thing, and prove to me by most 
 unanswerable argument and undeniable proof that I can t, and 
 then go right straight ahead and do it. 
 
 I don t believe I ever did anything _n my life worth the 
 doing, save when I was driven to it by the flat contradiction of 
 man or Fate. If a man pats me on the back and tells me that 
 216 
 
ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 I can do a bit of work better than anybody else on earth, I am 
 very liable to sniff the incense gratefully and take his word for 
 it, and let it go at that, and do nothing. But if he says I can t 
 do it, it does my soul good to do that very thing. 
 
 I love to write. If I were thirty years younger, I d like 
 to go back and take my old desk-place on the Hawk-Eye. There 
 isn t a thing about desk work that I do not enjoy, from the 
 moment of incubation to the final revision of the manuscript 
 or the reading of the last proof. I don t find so much pleasure 
 in the completed sketch; the finished work hasn t much charm 
 for me; but down to the very center of brain and heart, I do 
 love the work of building, even such light and flimsy work as 
 mine, is at its best, or rather, its least, bad. 
 
 As to his favorite books, he said: 
 
 There are three books I always pack in my valise when I 
 leave home the Bible, Shakespeare, Mrs. Browning. If I 
 add a fourth it is Thackeray; and next to him certainly Charles 
 Lamb. Something of Riley comes next "Old Fashioned 
 Roses", preferably. Eugene Field, of course. And Carlyle 
 has a never-failing hold upon my liking. And in my room, 
 handy for a "night-cap" book, Thackeray s "Roundabout 
 Papers". 
 
 Some letters to his son show the tender and affec 
 tionate spirit of the man. Writing at Easter, 1898: 
 
 A happy joyous Easter to you, with all blessings for the 
 sunrise of your manhood. May you, like Joseph of old, be 
 
 "A fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well, whose 
 branches run over the wall." Whose " Bow abode in strength, 
 and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of 
 the Mighty God of Jacob; . . . Even by the God of thy 
 father, who shall help thee; and by the Almighty, who shall 
 bless thee with the blessings of heaven above, blessings of the 
 deep that lieth under. . . . The blessings of thy father have 
 prevailed above the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost 
 bound of the Everlasting hills." 
 
 This letter written in reply to an account of the 
 class dinner at Haverf ord and to reach Bryn Mawr upon 
 
 217 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 his son s twenty-first birthday, expresses his breadth 
 of affection, his boundless hope for the man s future. 
 It reveals his love expressed in words of rich meaning 
 and with the characteristic pyramiding of subjects and 
 phrases that was his peculiar gift: 
 
 Your letter of April 2nd was received here on the 5th. And 
 the Class Dinner is eaten and digested? "Gone glimmering 
 down the light of other days a school boy s tale the wonder 
 of an hour? " Gone are the sweets and solids; forgotten already 
 the taste of the fluffy things; the lips that smacked joyously 
 over a strange but toothsome entree are puckered over a pun 
 gent line or a twisted root; the mouths that watered over 
 what was coming next are yelling behind the coach lines; the 
 dinner is gone. 
 
 But always there is something at these banquets that 
 abides. Somewhere or other, tucked away in the memory, 
 locked up in brain cell and encysted in the heart as well. Some 
 thing of the Class Dinner there is, that is thoroughly assimi 
 lated. It goes into the blood and brawn, knots itself into the 
 toughest muscles; knits itself into the hardest bone; turns 
 into "red blood" and throbs with human affections, with hope, 
 and courage; turns into gray matter and thinks and guides 
 these affections; ennobles these friendships of boyhood and 
 young manhood; turns into fire and burns with lofty purpose 
 and pure fidelity. Something "stays with you", Son; don t 
 you know it? And feel it? The class dinner goes with the 
 class room; the social element is as much a part of life as is 
 the love of the books. These friendships of today will be 
 knitted more firmly tomorrow. 
 
 It is a splendid thing to be a Man, dear. To feel in your 
 soul and brain certain responsibilities that you must face and 
 carry alone. To realize that Zeebs and Dedie are now the dear 
 est and most loving friends you have on this earth, but that 
 they can now only say "I advise" and "I suggest" and "I 
 wish". We can no longer say to you, with any legal right 
 "Thou shalt." Only God and your conscience say that to 
 you now. You are a man, and you breathe free air for the 
 first time in your life. You can come and go as you list. You 
 
 218 
 
ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 are a man. And being a man, you stand, as, in a certain sense, 
 you never did before, face to face with God s Eternal "Must". 
 What he says "Must", must be. And it must be done. And 
 there is no avoiding it. Rebels or willing subjects, at the last 
 every man has to do God s will. 
 
 How splendidly you are equipped for manhood s responsi 
 bilities. Two women, with their unselfish loves, and pure 
 ambitions for you, and sweet purposes for you, have gone into 
 your very life little Momsie and Dedie. Your educational 
 atmosphere has been clear and godly. You have breathed a 
 good air. Your years of preparation have been pleasantly 
 environed. You are a well equipped and a well-drilled soldier. 
 Therefore, much is expected of you. 
 
 I am so glad for you, dear. The growing years mean so 
 much. My own didn t have a good trend. The camp and the 
 barrack-room, the trench and the fort are not the best schools 
 for the highest character. The " Mulvaney and Kipling stand 
 ards of personal honor and fidelity to duty may be high enough, 
 but, their moral standard, if not positively low, is painfully lax. 
 God be thanked you have escaped this. You don t have to 
 race against a handicap. 
 
 And yet, my own dear Boy, dearest and best and truest 
 and Best-Loved Comrade, even with the best preparations, 
 the camp and the barrack influence somehow get into every 
 man s life a little bit. And the Man must rise above them. 
 Sin lieth in wait. It is a young lion; strong, brave, defiant, 
 cruel. "A man s foes shall be they of his own household" 
 of his own life and heart and mind. 
 
 Now, dear Boy, the devil didn t make us. God made man 
 after His own image. The devil has no creative power. He 
 can only disfigure, defile, corrupt, what God has made; that s 
 all. When God breathed the soul into the Man, he breathed 
 into him a spark of divinity a touch of the God. He breathed 
 into him every impulse that he has; every desire, every passion, 
 and made him pure as the angels with them all. Now remem 
 ber, you have no passions that are not given you of God. Keep 
 them pure as he intends you shall, and every one of them will 
 add manly strength and vigor to your soul and arm and brain. 
 Don t let sin abuse them. Don t let the devil disfigure them. 
 They come of God; use them for him, and at the last surrender 
 them to Him again, pure and clean as He gave them. 
 
 219 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 A thousand congratulations, my dear, dear Son! May all 
 the years of your manhood come to you freighted with work 
 and responsibilities, with good hope, good heart, good courage, 
 good purpose. You remember what old Polonias says to 
 Laertes: . 
 
 "To thine own self be true 
 And it shall follow, as the night the day, 
 Thou can st not then be false to any man." 
 
 All the world is before you, dear Prince! And all space! 
 And all Time! Make conquest of Destiny then! " Steady! 
 Forward Guide right March!" Hip hip Hurrah! And 
 again hurrah! ! And once more Hurrah! ! ! Give you God 
 speed, dear Prince! 
 
 Most lovingly, your 
 
 FATHER 
 
 And this letter written upon the boy s twenty-first 
 birthday: 
 
 You were a happy child. The happiest child all the year 
 round, I ever knew in my life. And all your resources were 
 within yourself. Your happiness was heaven-born. Your joy 
 was in your heart. You were as happy and content in your 
 home, with only your three "grown-ups", Little Momsie, and 
 Dedie and Zeebs, about you as you were with a house full of 
 children. Indeed you were at your happiest at home. 
 
 And now the days of your boyhood are over. A boy s 
 heart you will carry in your breast for many years, I hope. A 
 boy s happiness; a boy s enthusiasms with a man s purposes 
 and a man s powers and a man s courage. I pray the years of 
 your manhood, in its happiness, the purity of its joys, the 
 fidelity of its convictions, may be foreshadowed by your boy 
 hood. God give you all grace and strength and courage and 
 patience. 
 
 Never did he fail to include the reflections based 
 upon his years of experience and observation, for 
 instance: 
 
 I believe in practical education too, in Biology and Botany. 
 But, we can t and we mustn t all be Biologists and Botanists. 
 
 220 
 
ESTABLISHING ROBIN S NEST, BRYN MAWR 
 
 The world wants dreamers, poets, prophets, dear they are all 
 three the same Bunyan, Shakespeare, Isaiah as well as Botan 
 ists and Biologists. Biology and Botany have changed and 
 "reviewed their own decisions" and reversed their teaching 
 many times since Bunyan, Shakespeare and Isaiah. But they 
 have not changed. It seems to me that Poetry is nearer Truth 
 than anything else in the world. God himself was Poet and 
 Artist when he formed this planet. Look at it! 
 
 The activities of this period of his life as reflected 
 through his letters were centered at Robin s Nest, 
 for which he held an affection greatly enhanced be 
 cause of its setting. Bryn Mawr a rare bit of Old 
 England in a corner of his native State appealed to 
 his intense love of nature. 
 
 He thus wrote of it: 
 
 Bryn Mawr a dimple on the landscape; its artistic varie 
 ties in home architecture; lawns that are dreams and gardens 
 that are visions; roads and drives that are smoother and 
 cleaner and harder the oftener it rains; its shaded lanes, with 
 a fringe of snowy-blossomed or crimson-berried dogwoods under 
 the overhanging chestnuts, and maples, old oaks and great 
 tulip-poplars; and such incomparable woodland strolls over 
 leafy carpets and moss-grown paths; delightful wood roads 
 that entice you into the heart of the woods, and there fade into 
 a squirrel track that disappears up a tree, and so leaves you 
 most happily lost a thousand miles from human help and only 
 ten miles from Philadelphia; brooks that run beside the paths 
 in the woods, babbling and chattering and whispering, and 
 always coming back close to the path, after they have run away 
 from it, like a playing child, for all the world as though the path 
 had been there the longer, and the brook would get lost if it 
 got too far out of sight; the green meadows; the gentle slope 
 of the hills; and everywhere such woods such woods! 
 
 221 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 CASUAL INCIDENTS 
 
 MANY were the interesting incidents of his 
 career from the beginning of his Hawk-Eye 
 days to his leaving Bryn Mawr. On one 
 occasion, when he visited at Denver, a News 
 reporter and Rev. Myron W. Reed, the brilliant 
 preacher who died a number of years ago, called upon 
 him at the same time. Burdette, Riley and Reed were 
 friends of the old days when Burdette was accustomed 
 to visit Riley at Indianapolis. 
 
 " He and Riley came in on me," said Reed, "about 
 six o clock Sunday night, when they knew I would be 
 busier than a pirate, and they sat down, one on each 
 side of me, and told me to go right on writing, and then 
 commenced to tell stories across me. I did not write 
 much." 
 
 He and Reed talked at the same time of "Bill" Nye, 
 a common friend. 
 
 "When Nye went to New York," said Burdette, 
 "we were a little anxious to see how he would stand 
 transplanting to the East. Riley showed me a letter 
 Nye wrote to him in which he said he had been intro 
 duced to Mrs. Langtry and Mrs. James Brown Potter, 
 and their forwardness so disgusted him that he thanked 
 the Lord that He had given his share of beauty to Mrs, 
 Langtry and his hair to the Seven Sutherland Sisters/ 
 
 In the same exchange of recollections with Reed, 
 Mr. Burdette said: 
 
 I used to write on the trains, but I don t any more. Once 
 in a while I get out my pad and put a beautiful point on a 
 222 
 
CASUAL INCIDENTS 
 
 pencil and number about twenty-five pages, and then I suddenly 
 discover that my hat is in the seat back of me and my throat 
 feels like a lime kiln, and my head is back and I suspect that I 
 have been snoring, and from the pleased look on the faces of 
 my fellow-travelers, I am sure that my diagnosis is right, and 
 I start for the water tank and feel like staying there. 
 
 Again he told of this incident: 
 
 Riley visited us at Bryn Mawr, and you should have seen 
 the time he had trying to fix up his routes through New Jersey. 
 He hadn t any idea of locality, and a time-table was perfectly 
 blind to him. The one he had had several columns showing 
 the population of the town and also the fare. At last he turned 
 to me in despair. "Look at this thing," he said, "it hasn t got 
 any sense. All I can find out is that I arrive at Lambert at 
 3,324 and leave there at $2.47." 
 
 I went home from a lecture trip one time and found Jim 
 sitting in the depot. I said he must come home with me. It 
 was while my wife was in the hospital, which was only a block 
 from the depot. He demurred and said he hadn t time, but I 
 rushed him off, and called in my wife and my boy and sent for 
 the doctor and introduced him to everybody, and finally noticed 
 that at every introduction they laughed. Finally I said, "Jim, 
 how long is it since you were here?" and he said, "Yesterday." 
 I had been introducing him to folks he knew better than I did. 
 
 His work was inspirational, and the consistent and 
 sustained effort required in building a novel was 
 impossible for him: 
 
 There is one thing I cannot do [he said], I cannot write a 
 serial story. My work has always been daily newspaper work, 
 which teaches a fellow to finish his story in one issue. Several 
 times I have been asked to write a serial, have promptly 
 accepted, sat down to my work, outlined the story, and then 
 finished the whole business introduced, married and killed 
 the whole outfit in the first chapter, had to create a new family 
 for the second chapter, start a new settlement for the third, 
 and import a shipload of immigrants for the fourth. Somehow 
 I cannot give my characters the blessing of long life. Loved of 
 the gods, they die young. 
 
 223 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 At fifty-two, in a newspaper interview at Spokane, 
 he said: 
 
 I would rather write than lecture, and I used to do both, 
 but now when I travel about the country with a lecture, my 
 pen grows rusty. One thing at a time is enough. Good men 
 are scarce, my son, and I must take care of myself for the sake 
 of the American people. I am seven years older than Bill Nye 
 was when he carried his laughter into the silent land. Two 
 years older than Eugene Field. Seven years older than Bunner 
 of Puck, who is now fighting for his life in San Francisco. 
 Older than Riley who was wearily struggling through brain 
 fever in Indianapolis, and you see the patriarch has to be mind 
 ful of his strength. All these men I knew in the early days. 
 Met them often and loved them well. Learned the serious 
 side of their laughing lives, and knew the deep octave of humor 
 pathos, that throbbed in their hearts. 
 
 As if he was to receive compensation for such 
 appreciation of others, in later years an author who 
 had received a kindly note from him, wrote to a mutual 
 friend: 
 
 Such a beautiful letter from Mr. Burdette a man who recalls 
 for us more fully than any other living writer, the humor and 
 pathos of Dickens. It quite thrills me with, I trust, a feeling 
 better than vanity, to find anything done by one s obscure self 
 noted by such a man. 
 
 And Mr. Bok, as late as 1913, penned this appre 
 ciation: 
 
 To my mind no man has ever equalled you in your marvelous 
 combination of the humorous with the philosophical. And you 
 will stand alone as the best exponent of that peculiarly effective 
 combination in writing! 
 
 He had nothing of sham or hypocrisy, and little of 
 emotional hero worship. He was disposed to give 
 things their proper value, as in an article on "The 
 Laughter of Yesterday": 
 
 224 
 
CASUAL INCIDENTS 
 
 Many most of the stones of men of our own day and 
 generation lack interest for the public mind because they are 
 too personal. They belong to the dead men s intimate friends. 
 After he has been dead 100 years this element is eliminated, 
 it has faded out. What remains is of the immortal part of the 
 man. It is that which belongs to posterity. 
 
 Not long ago Phillips Brooks letters to the children of his 
 household were published in one of the magazines, and simply 
 because they were written by Phillips Brooks. They were just 
 such letters as almost any man might have written to the 
 children at home, and at the risk of being burned at the stake 
 for heresy, one may say the same thing of many of the letters 
 of Robert Louis Stevenson, now being published. Some of 
 them may be characteristic. Many of them most of them 
 are like many of the letters you have written and do write to 
 your mother, and if your mother may be placed on the stand, 
 she will convince the jury that your letters are vastly more 
 entertaining and original. 
 
 In the old days, when " Youth beheld all happiness gleam 
 ing in the prospect", I have strolled about the streets of St. 
 Louis with Eugene Field, marking the trail by a mile of 
 "giggle". Could any of the things at which I laughed make 
 you laugh now? No; rather they would make you pity us 
 for our light-mindedness, because the giggle belonged to the 
 time and the place and the friends who giggled. Like Emerson s 
 sea-weed, I could not bring home with the weed cast up by 
 that light, foam-crested tide of our laughter, the cry of the 
 gulls, the long line of coast, the wash of the waves on the beach, 
 the glint of the sunshine on the shells. 
 
 To drag Eugene s drolleries out of their environment is to 
 pluck up a dainty wild flower by its roots from its mossy bed 
 in some forest glade, carry it in your hot hands several miles 
 through the summer sun, and then plant it in the garden of 
 roses. 
 
 His newspaper method, what might be termed his 
 creed, with respect to his fellows, is indicated in one of 
 his comments after years of newspaper work: 
 
 Every time you are tempted to say an ungentle word or 
 
 write an unkind line, or say a mean, ungracious thing about 
 
 15 225 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 anybody, just stop; look ahead twenty-five years and think 
 how it may come back to you then. Let me tell you how I 
 write mean letters and bitter editorials, my boy. Sometimes 
 when a man has pitched into me and "cut me up rough", and 
 I want to pulverize him and wear his gory scalp on my girdle 
 and hang his hide on my fence, I write a letter or editorial that 
 is to do the business. I write something that will drive sleep 
 from his eyes and peace from his soul for six weeks. Oh, I do 
 hold him over a slow fire and roast him! Gall and aqua fortis 
 drip from my blistering pen. Then I don t mail the letter, 
 and I don t print the editorial! 
 
 There s always plenty of time to crucify a man. The 
 vilest criminal is entitled to a little reprieve. I put the manu 
 script away in a drawer. Next day I look at it. The ink is 
 cold; I read it over and say: " I don t know about this. There s 
 a good deal of bludgeon and bowie-knife journalism in that. 
 I ll hold it over a day longer." The next day I read it over 
 again. I laugh, and say "Pshaw!" and I can feel my cheeks 
 getting a little hot. The fact is, I am ashamed that I ever 
 wrote it, and I hope that nobody has seen it, and I have half 
 forgotten the article or letter that filled my soul with rage, I 
 haven t hurt anybody, and the world goes right along, making 
 24 hours a day as usual, and I am all the happier. 
 
 Try it, my boy. Put off your bitter remarks until tomor 
 row. Then, when you try to say them deliberately, you ll find 
 that you have forgotten them, and ten years later, ah! how 
 glad you will be that you did! Be good-natured, my boy. 
 Be loving and gentle with the world, and you ll be amazed to 
 see how dearly and tenderly the worried, tired, vexed, harassed 
 old world loves you. 
 
 His humor pervaded everything, and was so cun 
 ningly applied it disarmed many a critic. When his 
 bureau managers were dissatisfied with the criticisms 
 and comments he had selected for a folder which was 
 designed to be circulated in connection with the pub 
 licity to be given his lectures, he had printed for them 
 an eight-page folder, a page of which may be repro 
 duced: 
 
 226 
 
CASUAL INCIDENTS 
 
 Introducing 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE 
 
 "Where is our usual Manager of Mirth?" Midsummer Night s 
 Dream. 
 
 " I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent 
 fancy." Hamlet. 
 
 "0, you shall see him laugh till his face be like a wet cloak ill 
 laid up." Henry IV. 
 
 "A merrier man, 
 
 Within the limits of becoming mirth 
 I never spent an hour s talk withal." 
 
 Love s Labor Lost. 
 
 "From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot he is 
 all mirth he hath a heart as sound as a bell, and his tongue is 
 the clapper; for what his heart thinks, his tongue speaks." 
 Much Ado About Nothing. 
 
 "His eye begets occasion for his wit; 
 For every object that the one doth catch, 
 The other turns to a mirth loving jest." 
 
 Love s Labor Lost. 
 
 After two pages of such flattering comment from 
 Shakespeare, he followed it with equally pertinent 
 selections from Milton, Thackeray and Carlisle, with 
 the observation that surely the approval of these 
 eminent men should convince any one he was alto 
 gether worth hearing. 
 
 Some of the humorous incidents of his lecture 
 experience he has written in his own inimitable way. 
 This account of a Southern incident is worth preserving: 
 
 If I had not been a Funny Man, I might have been a 
 Railroad Magnate or a Corporation Lawyer or some other of 
 those Get-rich-quick Concerns. One morning, two years ago, 
 I missed connection at Nashville. I had an engagement to 
 lecture in Louisville that night a most important one, before 
 
 227 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 the John A. Broadus Camp of Confederate Veterans. I just 
 naturally had to get there. When I found the train upon 
 which I was an ex-passenger had gone and left me, I flew to the 
 "Ellen N" and pled for a special. The officials sympathized 
 with me and let me have a special for 187 miles at one dollar 
 per. That from a lecturer! When Mr. Morgan set out to buy 
 the Louisville & Nashville, if he had come to me I could and 
 would have told him exactly what Mr. Gates would do to him. 
 
 But it was a groundhog case with me, so I went down into 
 my narrow-gauge wallet and fished up the $187, which left me 
 just enough to go without dinner and climb to my private car 
 in solitary and penniless grandeur. They gave me a nice little 
 light engine, and the man in the cab made the wheels go round, 
 and we slid the State of Tennessee underneath us at seventy 
 miles an hour. All went well until we got within about sixty- 
 five miles of Louisville, when we caught up with the train that 
 had run away from me in the morning, with the engine crippled, 
 or in the ditch, or something. And they didn t do a thing but 
 take my nice little "pay car" engine and hook it on to that 
 great emigrant-tourist-and-general-express train. It was like 
 hitching up a dainty little three-minute "stepper" to a coal 
 cart. We crawled along, with occasional stops for breath, and 
 drifted into Louisville about nine o clock or after. 
 
 Mrs. Burdette was in Louisville, and, getting a wire about 
 my detention, she went over to the hall and held the audience 
 for me, but many had escaped before she got there, and the 
 committee claimed damages. And as they held the bag, I 
 naturally held the umbrella. But after I had settled with the 
 committee I put on my war paint, then painted it over with a 
 soft coat of sweet Quaker dove-color, mixed with the oil of 
 kindness, which I have ever found to be a little the best fighting 
 color on earth, and sailed into the office of Superintendent 
 Johnson. Somebody had signalled him there was a torpedo 
 boat in the roadstead and he was ready for me. He fired a 
 shot to windward, and we came to close action. 
 
 "Now," he said, "if we hadn t given you that special train 
 you could not have reached Louisville at all, could you?" 
 
 "No, sir," I said, so meekly that even my dove-colored 
 paint faded to a soft ashes-of-roses hue. 
 
 "And by the service of our special you did make your 
 engagement?" 
 228 
 
CASUAL INCIDENTS 
 
 "Yes, sir," I said. 
 
 "And without it you would have lost your engagement, 
 your fee and disappointed your audience?" 
 
 "Yes, sir," I said. 
 
 "And you would have had large damage to pay for failure 
 of contract?" 
 
 "Indeed I would," I said. 
 
 "And we really saved all that for you, didn t we?" 
 
 "Indeed you did," I assented. 
 
 "Well, then," he went on, " I don t see what claim you have 
 for any rebate." 
 
 I told him I didn t want a cent of rebate. I was perfectly 
 willing to pay for my train. 
 
 "Then," he said, "what do you want?" 
 
 "Well," I said, "I want pay for my engine and my service. 
 I want pay for hauling the United States mail, the express 
 matter, baggage car, the smoker, three day coaches and a 
 Pullman. I want my pro rata on all the tickets and fares 
 collected on that train. I want my mileage on all that stuff, 
 human and merchandise for sixty-five miles. That was my 
 engine that hauled that train into Louisville. I don t want 
 much; I only want all I can reach my arms around and what 
 little there may be outside of em." 
 
 "Well," he said, "suppose we cut the price of your special 
 in two how would that strike you?" 
 
 I said that was the very thing I had up my sleeve. The 
 Superintendent applied the axe to the bill, a clerk signed a check 
 and gave it to me, and we parted friends. 
 
 He told also in his later years how one of Riley s 
 cleverest platform stories came to be. During a visit 
 with Riley some years ago, Mr. Burdette having gone 
 to Indianapolis when Riley was recovering from a 
 stroke of apoplexy, they exchanged many recollections, 
 and Mr. Burdette, in writing of the visit, said: 
 
 Riley talked a great deal, and with very tender and loving 
 laughter, of Bill Nye, his old time yoke-fellow. Riley knew 
 better than any other man perhaps, the pathetic shadows that 
 drifted across Nye s patient, brave, hopeful life. For years he 
 
 229 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 was a sick man, and many nights he was at his work on the 
 platform when he should have been in the hospital. 
 
 Bill was good-natured, even with the bores whom Riley 
 slammed down. One morning on their lyceum tour through 
 Georgia, they landed in a city where they knew by past experi 
 ence they would be assailed by self-appointed delegations of 
 entertainers. They would be importuned to take long drives 
 over rough and dusty roads, to see things they had seen a thou 
 sand times and didn t want to see the first time. They would 
 be dragged away to luncheon with people who made them tired 
 and dragooned to dinner with folk who bored them. And Jim 
 rebelled. They obtained privacy in their own rooms long 
 enough to wash their faces and the poet said: 
 
 "Bill, here s where I shake the committee on hospitality. 
 I m not going out of my room till we go to the hall tonight. 
 I ll play ill, I ll do anything but wear myself out listening to a 
 lot of old stories badly told all day and then go before the audi 
 ence that pays its good money to hear us at our best so tired 
 and worn out that I look and feel like a shadow on the scenery. 
 Let s send away our genial friends and sleep till dinner time." 
 
 So Jim went dead, as he knows how to do, but Bill couldn t 
 bear to disappoint the committee. He came back to dine at 
 the hotel, however, pale and tired, but faintly smiling and trying 
 to feel strong for the evening s work. Jim was mad. He 
 determined to teach Bill a lesson. 
 
 "When we went down to dinner," he told it to me, " I made 
 up my mind I d give him enough of old stale, worm-eaten 
 stories, such as I knew he d been feeding on all afternoon. I 
 began to tell him as earnestly as though it was newer than the 
 hour, the oldest story I ever heard. I heard the circus clown 
 tell it when I was a boy and the first eternity only knows how 
 old it had to be before a clown would be allowed to use it. 
 
 "You ve heard it long before ever you heard me tell it 
 the old man s story of the soldier carrying his wounded com 
 rade off the battlefield the comrade whose leg was first shot 
 off and whose head was carried away by a second cannon ball 
 on their way to the field hospital. 
 
 " Well, I dragged the old thing out as long as I could, just 
 to weary poor Bill. I told it in the forgetful fashion of an old 
 man with confused memory; told the point two or three times 
 
 230 
 
CASUAL INCIDENTS 
 
 before I came to it; went back again and again to pick up 
 dropped stitches in the web of my story; wandered and maund 
 ered. Thinks I, I ll give this lad a taste of age-long stories that 
 will sicken him of them forever. I made it as long and dreary 
 as I knew how." 
 
 But to Riley s indignant amazement Nye received the nar 
 rative with convulsions of merriment. He choked over his 
 meat and drink until he quit trying to eat and just listened, 
 giggled, chuckled and roared. He declared it was the best 
 thing Riley had ever done and insisted that he put it in his 
 program. 
 
 At first Riley thought his joke-fellow had only detected 
 the plot and was meeting it in his own way. But he convinced 
 Jim that he was in earnest and, after about a month of this 
 importunity, Riley told the story to an audience of two thou 
 sand people. The galleries fell, the house went wild, and he had 
 to tell it again. Ever after it was one of his funniest numbers. 
 The story has been told a million times by a hundred thousand 
 people. But there is but one Riley in the hundred thousand. 
 
 Another story of this period of lecture life he told 
 in his own words: 
 
 I recall the last time I appeared in Toronto. Bill Nye 
 had preceded me, and the papers simply crucified him. He 
 was followed by James Whitcomb Riley, and they went for 
 him worse than they did for Nye. But when I arrived I made 
 up my mind that I would win, and I tried my best to succeed 
 and talked my loveliest. I felt so sure of the result that for 
 once I broke my rule not to read a paper before breakfast, and 
 ordered up the Empire. 
 
 Well, son, that was the worst roast that any man ever got. 
 The editor was a man named E. E. Sheppard, whom I had 
 known in the states. He was a southerner and had gone to 
 Canada after the war, but he had been a friend, and to think 
 that a man with whom I had broken bread and eaten salt 
 could treat me so was simply unbearable. I don t know to 
 this day whether he saw the article or not, but it was a regular 
 cruel scorcher. I packed up at once and left, and down at 
 Peoria I happened to pick up a paper a few days after and read 
 a dispatch to the effect that the Empire office had been de- 
 
 231 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 stroyed by fire the night before. I headed straight for a tele 
 graph office and sent this message: "Dear Sheppard: How do 
 you like a roast yourself?" I did not get an answer, but it 
 was a consolation to me, I admit. 
 
 The Saturday Evening Post in 1902 gave this account 
 of a lecture experience showing his human quality: 
 
 In the winter of 1885 two college boys of Wooster, Ohio, 
 desiring to make some money to get fraternity pins, decided to 
 bring on a lecturer, and secured Mr. Robert J. Burdette for 
 $125. They posted the town with huge bills saying, "He is 
 Coming", and later with others saying, "He is Here", and 
 giving his name. The pasting of the first lot was looked upon 
 as a college prank and detectives were engaged to hunt for the 
 perpetrators. 
 
 When the night arrived a very small audience assembled in 
 the opera house. To add to the discomfiture of the young men 
 Burdette was delayed by a wreck and did not arrive until ten 
 o clock, by which time some of the audience were demanding 
 their money back. One of the boys strove to hold the audience 
 by reading telegrams from Burdette, some genuine and some 
 fictitious, giving his progress. The other one went to the train 
 to meet the lecturer, and Burdette, noticing his long face as they 
 rode back, said: 
 
 "What s the matter? Haven t you got a good house?" 
 
 "No, indeed; mighty poor," said the young fellow. 
 
 "Cheer up, my boy," said Burdette; "cheer up. I ll 
 never let it be said after I m dead that any young man ever 
 lost anything by Bob Burdette." 
 
 The lecture itself was a success, lasting until past midnight. 
 It was Saturday night and at twelve o clock Mr. Burdette took 
 out his watch and announced the fact, and said that if there 
 were any ministers in the audience they could be excused. 
 
 When it came time to settle the boys found that after paying 
 other expenses they had but $66, and visions of a forced draft 
 on father came to one of them and the sacrifice of a pet calf was 
 the sole resource left to the other. 
 
 Burdette said: "Well, boys, how much have you left after 
 taking out all the expenses? Sixty-six dollars, eh? Well, there 
 are three of us; that s just twenty-two dollars apiece." 
 232 
 
CASUAL INCIDENTS 
 
 They insisted that he take it all, but he would not listen to 
 it. He said: "No, we are all fraternity boys and we ll share 
 alike. We belong to another fraternity, my boys, and that is 
 the fraternity of humanity. All I ask of you is that, if you 
 ever meet some other young man in trouble you will give him 
 a lift and think of Bob Burdette." 
 
 Characteristics which endeared him to his friends 
 and which they hold in memory, are illustrated by the 
 reminiscence of Mr. James B. Borland, an old Pennsyl 
 vania friend: 
 
 It was in 1880 that I made the acquaintance of Robert J. 
 Burdette. He had lectured here the year before, coming in on 
 a train in the middle of the night from Emlenton, in the lower 
 part of our county, and as there were no night clerks in the 
 hotels here in those days, he was compelled to lie in front of 
 the hotel fire to slumber until morning. I did not hear him on 
 that occasion, but know that he at once ingratiated himself 
 into the hearts of our people. 
 
 When he returned, in 1880, he lectured under the auspices 
 of the Owls, a literary society, one of the members of which, 
 Thomas Alexander, who had fallen in love with Burdette the 
 year before, filled in an off night for him at Warren, arranging 
 with me to go along to look after the business end. It was a 
 bitter cold night in March, and Parshall Hall, where the lecture 
 was delivered, was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator in the 
 summer time. I sold the tickets at the box office, and when 
 Mr. Burdette arrived he spent some time with me there, during 
 which the editor of a weekly paper presented his card. There 
 was only a handful of people present, and I thought of calling 
 the lecture off, so I turned to Mr. Burdette and asked what I 
 should do. He replied: "Pass him in and send out and get 
 him a bottle of champagne and a box of cigars." Demurring 
 against going ahead with the program, he said: "We ll trot 
 for the gate receipts, anyway." On account of the chilly 
 atmosphere of the hall, he retained his overcoat and drew a 
 chair up to the footlights, where there was a trifle of warmth, 
 remarking, as he did so, that the audience was so small he felt 
 like taking them on his lap. Then he proceeded to entertain 
 them in the manner of which he was a past master. 
 
 233 
 
ROBERT J. BTJRDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 The next day he went to Titusville, and an incident in 
 connection with our departure is worth relating, as showing the 
 spontaneity of his humor. The station was a little, box-like 
 affair, with a narrow aisle, and while we were seated there, 
 awaiting the arrival of our train, a fanner wearing a heavy 
 overcoat, with bulging pockets, passed down the aisle, his coat 
 brushing against the people on either side. "Now there s a 
 man," said Burdette, "who takes so much room in this world 
 that when he dies and is buried in a six-inch coffin his friends 
 will take a second look at him to see if he is not lying on his side." 
 
 On the train when the "butcher" came through he dropped 
 a book in my lap that proved to be a copy of Burdette s " Rise 
 and Fall of the Mustache and Other Hawkeyetems". Not 
 being aware of the fact that such a book was on the market, 
 I naturally expressed my surprise and pleasure and purchased 
 the copy, Mr. Burdette offering to write an inscription on the 
 fly-leaf, which he did, as follows: 
 
 MY DEAR BORLAND: 
 
 If you have a friend and you love him well, 
 
 Let my advice through your friendship glimmer; 
 Print all his vices in "nonpareil", 
 
 But publish his virtues in big "long primer". 
 With the compliments of your friend, the author, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 On the train, March 9, 1880. 
 
 Needless to say, this book is one of my choicest possessions, 
 as well as the memory of friendship that lasted through all the 
 years. I was only in my nineteenth year when I met him, and 
 on account of my being in the newspaper business at such an 
 early age, he seemed to show a particular fondness for me. 
 Afterwards, whenever he lectured anywhere near within an 
 afternoon s ride by train, I went to have a visit with him, and 
 heard the lecture on "The Rise and Fall of the Mustache" so 
 often that I could almost deliver it myself. 
 
 On another occasion he visited Franklin early in April, 
 the season when people were moving. After the lecture, with 
 one or two others, we spent some time in his room at the hotel, 
 he and I going for a short walk before midnight. We ran across 
 
 234 
 
CASUAL INCIDENTS 
 
 an acquaintance of mine, who played the violin for dances as a 
 side issue, coming along the street with his violin case under 
 his arm. I naturally enquired of him where he had been play 
 ing, and he replied: "At a house-warming in the Third Ward", 
 a practice often customary in those days when families sought 
 new abiding places. "I d like to attend something like that," 
 said Burdette, and asked the acquaintance if he would not 
 return and take us along. This he readily agreed to, and it 
 was not long after our arrival that he was the center of attrac 
 tion, himself playing the violin while the dozen or more people 
 danced. I relate this incident merely to show his versatility 
 and how easily he could adapt himself to his environment. 
 
 The last visit he made to Franklin was at my initiative. 
 I wrote the Bureau for a date, just for the sake of bringing him 
 on for an old-time visit. They fixed on a time in October, and 
 after I had announced it in my paper, some of the young ladies 
 of the Methodist church called on me to inquire under whose 
 auspices he was coming. I explained the matter to them and 
 said they could have the date if they so desired. A short time 
 afterward, at the request of the bureau, who had booked him 
 for an appearance at Library Hall, Pittsburgh, on the date 
 first given, we agreed to change to November. On the after 
 noon of the date in October when he was to appear in Pitts 
 burgh, who should come breezing cheerily into my office but 
 Burdette, at an hour when it was too late to catch a train for 
 the Smoky City. As soon as I espied him, I said : " What are 
 you doing here? You are advertised to lecture in Pittsburgh 
 tonight." "Well, I was never notified by the bureau after 
 they changed the Franklin date," he replied, "and so, thinking 
 I had a night off, stopped off for a visit with you on my way 
 to Erie, where I am to lecture tomorrow night." When he 
 came back the next month, and, by the way, he was greeted 
 with a crowded house, he told me he watched the Pittsburgh 
 papers the next morning after the night he was to have been 
 there and received some of the best notices he had experienced 
 in his entire career on the lecture platform. The reporters had 
 taken it for granted that he filled the date and wrote their 
 notices without going near Library Hall. 
 
 William Allen White, the editor of the Emporia 
 Gazette, was one of the friends of his earlier lecture days, 
 
 235 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 and after Burdette s appearance at Emporia, White s 
 comment is indicative of the Burdette spirit and of 
 White s appreciation: 
 
 Emporia is a better town today because Robert J. Burdette 
 was here last night with his "merry heart". A thousand 
 people came to Albert Taylor Hall to hear him, and a thousand 
 burdens are lighter today and ten thousand cares have fled. 
 Men with money bags have come to town and left sorrow and 
 wrinkles in their trail. Men with knotty problems to solve 
 have visited Emporia and headaches and weariness have fol 
 lowed them. Men with green-eyed envious visions of other 
 people s iniquity have come and heartaches and ranklings 
 have seared their scars upon those who listened. But the Man 
 with the Merry Heart came and today God s smile of benedic 
 tion is on the dull old town. The lecture was all very funny, 
 and all very true, and all very sweet gentle and kind as a 
 May breeze in an orchard with the apple trees in bloom. The 
 Little Man with the Merry Heart helped old Emporia out of 
 its crusty rut so God bless him for his coming. 
 
 He was fond of his pen and pencil, not alone for his 
 written work, but because of his gift at illumining his 
 letters, and, in fact, all of his manuscripts and docu 
 ments, with sketches and fancily colored and orna 
 mental initials. His captions too had always his spirit 
 of humor, for instance, the copy of a winter lecture 
 route which he made to send to a member of his family 
 is headed " Robin Tracks in the Snow". The back of 
 an old file case in which he kept copies of addresses and 
 sermons he labelled with elaborate care "Cold Tongue". 
 He had a keen appreciation always of the value of good 
 service, and in replying to a request for a lecture at a 
 reduced fee, he wrote: 
 
 DEAR MAN Yours of June 30th, asking for an engage 
 ment at "reduced rates" is at hand. Replying, I have to say 
 that at a time when 
 
 236 
 
CASUAL INCIDENTS 
 
 Hod Carriers, Drain Pipe Layers, Plasterers, Carpenters, 
 
 Graders, Ice Men, Garbage Collectors, Milk Men, City 
 
 Scavengers, Blacksmiths, Plumbers, Tramps, Cooks, 
 
 Waiters, Bell Boys, Chambermaids, Porters, 
 
 Bootblacks, Sandwich Men, Trolley Men, 
 
 "Hello" Girls, Painters, Hackmen, 
 
 Gamblers, Dog Catchers, and 
 
 Everybody else 
 
 unite in demanding an increase of wages about every fifteen 
 minutes and get it, and ask for more I would be ashamed 
 to step out on the platform if I belittled and cheapened my 
 own "trade", when every other working man in America is 
 exalting his. 
 
 For the past twenty-five years my fee has been high, but 
 it has always been the same. When times were so good that 
 we couldn t stand it, it didn t make me worth a cent more. 
 When times were so hard that men forgot what meat tasted 
 like, it didn t deteriorate me a cent. Other spellbinders soared 
 out of sight in the flush times and went down out of sight in 
 the years of the lean kine. I have always said, " My lecture is 
 worth just so much, rain or shine." I have always been a 
 "stand patter". 
 
 And now I am too old to change. Everybody knows what 
 my price is. And just one closing word, my boy I have been 
 on the platform nearly twenty-eight years, and I have seen 
 more lecture associations flattened out, smashed, "busted" 
 by $25 men, than I ever knew to be even "embarrassed" by 
 one-hundred-dollar men. Put that in your meerschaum and 
 inhale gently. 
 
 Never was he too busy to remember his old friends 
 of the bureau, and upon his return from a European 
 trip, he wrote the Lyceum Bureau at Boston in these 
 terms: 
 
 DEAR MAN: Where have I been since last June that I 
 didn t make any speeches last winter? Oh, well, I had been 
 traveling up and down the land of America under your own 
 piloting for twenty-five years on "one-night stands" and I 
 felt that I needed the change which travel alone could give to 
 
 237 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 such a sedentary life. So I set my sails in order, and smote 
 the sounding billows and came abroad. I went to London to 
 visit the Queen and now I am going back again to call on the 
 King; went up and down that land from castle to cathedral 
 and then hied me to Scotland to pick up a collection of "burrs" 
 to mix with my "Hs"; learned Edinboro by heart, which is 
 the only way to learn Scotland, visited the Highlands and all 
 the Loch country; tramped and stage-coached and boated; 
 came back to England and loitered in the Lake country of 
 "Wordsworthshire"; went to Paris to get rid of people who 
 wanted to know if "I had been to the Exposition". 
 
 Went to Germany and sailed up the Rhine as far as May- 
 ence; got off the boat and went to Munich; took in Oberam- 
 mergau and the " Passion Play"; went to Zurich and thence 
 to Lucerne; climbed mountains till my shoes wore out; went 
 to Geneva and studied Calvinism; crossed the mountains and 
 went to the Lake of Como to see if it was all true; went to 
 Milan to count the statues on the Cathedral; got to Venice 
 and found it hard work to tear myself away from the loveliest 
 "loafing place" on earth and it s on the water; then went 
 to Florence and lost myself in a thousand miles of picture 
 galleries; advertised for myself, got out and went to Rome to 
 see the Pope and the new King and Queen; then went to Naples; 
 visited Pompeii, but didn t locate there; dead town; climbed 
 Vesuvius and looked into the crater; nothing in it; drove 
 along the coast of Italy as far as Paestum; got on ship again 
 and came to Cairo; steam-boated up the Nile as far as the first 
 cataract; went into more tombs than I supposed there were 
 in the world; came back down the river a mile at a time; have 
 been enjoying Cairo and its bewildering streets and fascinating 
 bazars. 
 
 Next week we sail for Jaffa, and thence go to Jerusalem; 
 spend about a month in Palestine, then go to Damascus; visit 
 Baalbec, and get back to Egypt again; then sail for Athens; 
 spend the rest of March in Greece; then a little time in Turkey; 
 then to Austria and Germany; then another little stay in Paris; 
 thence to England for part of June, and home by the first of 
 July, ready to lecture the rest of my life, for I feel that I will 
 need a little travel for a change. 
 
 238 
 
CASUAL INCIDENTS 
 
 His newspaper feature articles, like many of his 
 personal letters, swing rapidly from grave to gay and 
 from gay to grave, and there are many choice bits of 
 pathos and philosophy to be found in the columns of 
 work for daily newspapers. A humorous letter for the 
 Brooklyn Eagle closed with these words: 
 
 Shall I chant something merry for you as I go? It s my 
 nature, you know. 
 
 And he followed this invitation to himself with a 
 poem "Under the Purple and Motley", which gives a 
 clearer view into the serious under-current of his 
 nature: 
 
 Well might the King wear sackcloth; his were a nation s woes, 
 And every sob from a million lips was one of his own heart 
 
 throes; 
 The tears of his people burned his cheeks, their hunger gnawed 
 
 his breast, 
 The pain that ached in their hollow eyes drove peace from his 
 
 sleepless rest. 
 
 But the Jester who laughed in the palace; who mocked at the 
 
 shriveled lips 
 Of gaunt-eyed Famine and turned aside her moan with his 
 
 nimble quips, 
 Who rippled a stave of a reveller s song, when the woman, with 
 
 bitter cry, 
 Shrieked, "Help, oh King, for God will not!" as the helpless 
 
 King passed by; 
 
 The Jester who grinned at the scanty fare they spread at the 
 
 royal board, 
 And tittered a grace, more jest than prayer and more to the 
 
 guests than the Lord; 
 Who wrinkled his face with a wry grimace, while the people 
 
 looked aghast 
 At the sackcloth under the robes of their King, as he went 
 
 sadly past. 
 
 239 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 The Jester whose merry gibes were heard in all that doleful 
 
 while 
 Should he wear sackcloth like the King why, Famine s self 
 
 would smile; 
 He light and empty of heart and thought as the jingling bells 
 
 he wore 
 He would laugh at the sackcloth and jest at the ache of the 
 
 heart it covered o er. 
 
 The Jester Death laughed in his face one day and the smile 
 
 on his lips was chilled; 
 So strange it seemed for him to die, that all the Court was 
 
 filled 
 With ripples of laughter, hushed and low, just tinged with pity 
 
 and shame, 
 But the smiles would come, when they coupled Death with the 
 
 frolicsome Jester s name. 
 
 So with pitying smiles and hands they dressed the dead for the 
 
 Court of Death, 
 They stripped off his motley the grotesque rags and then, 
 
 with startled breath 
 They looked in amaze, for chafing his breast with its irritant 
 
 rankle and sting, 
 Under his motley the Jester wore the sackcloth like a King. 
 
 240 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 CALIFORNIA AND PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 DURING a season of lecture engagements, Mr. 
 Burdette came to Eau Claire, Wis., early in 
 1879, to lecture in a course managed by my 
 husband, Professor N. M. Wheeler, then 
 principal of Eau Claire Seminary. In 1882 he lectured 
 in Appleton, Wis., in a lecture course again managed 
 by Professor Wheeler. A friendship was thus formed 
 between Professor Wheeler and myself and Mr. Bur 
 dette, that continued through the years. 
 
 Soon after Mrs. Burdette s death in 1884, Mr. Bur 
 dette again came to fulfill a lecture engagement at the 
 Winona Lake Assembly, Madison, Wis., bringing with 
 him his little boy, Robin, who was then in white kilts. 
 They were our guests and our little son, Roy Bradley 
 Wheeler, a baby in arms, first saw the man who was in 
 later years to be the "Daddy" of his manhood years. 
 In 1885, Professor Wheeler and I came to California, 
 he in search of health, which proved to be permanently 
 impaired, and he passed away, December 5, 1886. The 
 friendship which had continued between Mr. Burdette 
 and myself was evidenced by correspondence and inter 
 change of visits, he coming to the coast in 1887, again 
 in 1895 and in 1898. During this last visit, while a 
 guest in my home he was invited to preach a number 
 of times in Southern California, so that it was a most 
 natural thing, following a public announcement early 
 in 1899, that he was coming to Pasadena to live, as I 
 was to become Mrs. Burdette, that the First Presby 
 terian Church of Pasadena should extend to him an 
 
 16 241 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 invitation to supply its pulpit which had been vacant 
 for some time. The announcement of his acceptance of 
 the Presbyterian pulpit was made February 13th. This 
 necessitated his cutting his lecture course for the winter 
 somewhat short, that he might come to Pasadena the 
 last of March, which he did, arriving as the temporary 
 guest of Dr. and Mrs. Norman Bridge. Upon my 
 invitation, fourteen friends assembled for breakfast 
 one morning, and were somewhat surprised to find they 
 were also to witness the marriage ceremony, which was 
 conducted by Rev. A. Moss Merwin, a man dearly 
 beloved by us all. 
 
 Mr. Burdette s first sermon was preached Easter 
 morning, April, 1899, to a congregation which over 
 crowded the capacity of the church, and he often said 
 that the floral decorations and the music, prepared with 
 regard for the day and a welcome to him, was one of the 
 most beautiful things his memory could contain. The 
 cordiality with which the Presbyterian people accepted 
 this man of the Baptist faith, and the success with 
 which he drew all men unto him and strengthened the 
 church work from the Sabbath School through all the 
 various departments, was the foreshadowing of his 
 ability to build up the great church of his own faith 
 which was finally to be the scene of the crowning activ 
 ities of his life. 
 
 The fourteen months of service to this church were 
 interrupted by two months of lecture engagements, 
 which were of long standing and which he felt must be 
 fulfilled, but in spite of this his service to this church 
 was so successful that they invited him to become the 
 permanent pastor, though he was not a Presbyterian, 
 but a Baptist. A deep feeling on the part of both 
 Mr. Burdette and myself that while one may be justi- 
 
 242 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 fied in evoluting from one faith to another, after fifty 
 years of established connection with a given church, a 
 sudden transition was impossible, and the keener sense 
 of the justice to the pastors of the Presbyterian Church 
 who were rightly entitled to so alluring a pastorate, 
 determined Mr. Burdette that he could not for one 
 moment accede to their request. In declining the call 
 and while expressing in warmest terms his appreciation 
 of the Christian fellowship which he had enjoyed, he 
 said: 
 
 I am a Baptist; this is a Presbyterian church. If after forty 
 years of service in one denomination I could say to you that 
 in three months I had changed my convictions on certain points 
 of denominational differences, you would doubt the perfect 
 sincerity of that sudden conversion in a man of my years. And 
 I ought to doubt it myself. So long as I live you and I will be 
 loyal friends and cordial yoke-fellows. 
 
 Still desirous of having his presence as their pastor, 
 they invited him to become its permanent supply, and 
 he returned a like answer, but consented to remain with 
 the church as its pastor until a proposed European trip. 
 
 Just before leaving Pasadena he received from the 
 Session a letter which was to him the richest reward 
 for any service he may have rendered this church of my 
 persuasion: 
 
 PASADENA, CAL., May 25, 1900. 
 To the Reverend Robert J. Burdette. 
 DEAR BROTHER: 
 
 The session of the church being deeply impressed with the 
 excellent results of your labors while acting as our pastor during 
 the year about to close, desire on this occasion to express our 
 gratitude and thankfulness for your uniform faithfulness and 
 tireless zeal in the uplifting of our church and congregation, 
 and for the ennobling Christian influences your teaching has 
 instilled into our individual lives. 
 
 243 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Coming to us as you did at a time when we were without 
 a pastor, you took up the work, and have never faltered in 
 inciting us onward in the acquirement of all those high Christian 
 graces which make up the life of a follower of Christ. 
 
 At our mid-week meetings you have ever taught us to seek 
 to show ourselves as high and worthy examples of the true 
 followers of Christ, and in the pulpit your exposition of the 
 scriptures has quickened our sense of Christian duty and Chris 
 tian living, and broadened and deepened our love for the great 
 truth of the common brotherhood of mankind; and our realiza 
 tion of God s love for his children has often made our hearts to 
 burn within us as you have told us of the great price he has 
 given to redeem us. 
 
 Under your pastorate the attendance on our midweek meet 
 ings has greatly increased, and on the Sabbath the auditorium 
 is filled by an interested and appreciative audience. A large 
 number, both by letter and by profession have been added to 
 our membership ; our church edifice repaired and strengthened ; 
 our church debt greatly decreased ; our finances are in a highly 
 satisfactory condition; harmony prevails through our borders; 
 our spiritual life is revived; and a greater desire to do good 
 service for the Master possesses our hearts. 
 
 And now as we sorrow for your going from among us, we 
 again earnestly and heartily thank you for your efficient service 
 in the Master s cause. Our prayer is that our Heavenly Father 
 may bountifully bestow on you and yours His richest 
 benedictions. 
 (Signed) ROBERT STRONG, GEO. DEACON 
 
 Moderator pro tern. 
 
 W. A. EDWARDS, Clerk W. S. WINDHAM 
 C. A. MCCORMICK N. M. LUTZ 
 
 H. A. HOLME H. N. BALDWIN 
 
 This is given to show how generous they were 
 toward him in their acceptance of his leadings, and 
 with what truly Christian doctrine he must have given 
 forth his message to them, because it did not interfere 
 in any way with church doctrine, policy or creed, nor 
 did he step aside from his own in any of the essential 
 244 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE, AS PREACHER AND PASTOR 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 principles of faith. As he often smilingly remarked 
 he could not sprinkle their babies, but he could at least 
 hold the chalice for some one else to perform this church 
 act. 
 
 To quote from his farewell sermon a paragraph 
 inserted into the heart of it, as if this message to the 
 young people was his deepest concern: 
 
 Oh, mother, the day will come when your boy will tenderly 
 loose your clinging hands from around his neck, kiss you 
 good-by with your soul on his lips, and turn away to go out 
 into the great wide world with your, his mother s, "God Bless 
 You" for his talisman. What have you done for him? What 
 did you teach him when he was a child? What are you teaching 
 your little ones now, mother? By your lips, by your life, the 
 gospel of your life, by your love for the Word, and the church 
 of God, and your reverence for the Sabbath what are you 
 teaching the little ones? For I tell you that what you teach 
 them now will come back to them long years after the good-by 
 has been said, as one day it must be. Oh, in the name of Christ 
 give the boy and the girl something to take away from the home, 
 some sacred association, some holy teaching, some pure example 
 of faith and righteousness that all the combined temptations 
 and powers of the world, and sin, and death and hell can never 
 wrest from them something that will hold them true to you 
 and to God! Then you can smile through the tears of the 
 good-by. 
 
 The more intimate message indicates the humility 
 of spirit which was always his, coupled with an unusual 
 courage and daring when the truth was to be 
 proclaimed: 
 
 God has made sweet, indeed, to us the fellowship, the com 
 radeship, the dear companionship, of this past year. Every 
 day do I thank God for the friendships that have here been 
 knitted into my life friendships so loyal and so dear that it 
 seems to me sometimes they must have begun many years ago. 
 I thank you with an overflowing heart for the multiplied kind- 
 
 245 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 nesses you have shown me; for the patience with my blunders, 
 for the love that has blotted out my mistakes; for the partiality 
 of friendship that has chosen to ignore my limitations and over 
 look very apparent shortcomings; for the kindness that has so 
 sweetly borne with awkward ways. 
 
 Whatsoever things there have been in my ministry that 
 "have been just or lovely, or of good report, of any virtue, or 
 of any praise", have been borne out of your own loving hearts 
 that have chosen to "think on these things". Believe me, my 
 heart overflows with all these memories of your goodness and 
 kindness, and through all my life I will carry grateful and loving 
 thoughts of you. Let me, as I bid you farewell, again quote 
 from the great apostle, who says for us so grandly the things we 
 would love to say: 
 
 "Therefore, my brethren, dearly beloved and longed for, 
 my joy and my crown, so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly 
 beloved. And be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, for 
 giving one another, even as God for Christ s sake hath forgiven 
 you. Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children, and 
 walk in love, even as Christ also hath loved us." And " I will 
 return again unto you, if God wills." For myself and for her 
 who, under God s providence, led us into the joy of this great 
 friendship, and for the boy, I bid you farewell. In the sweet 
 benediction of our young people: "The Lord watch between 
 thee and me, when we are absent one from another." 
 
 In June, 1900, the older son, Robert J. Burdette, Jr., 
 graduated from Haverford, and the younger son 
 passed his entrance examinations for Harvard at seven 
 teen, with sufficient honors that a year of travel might 
 not be altogether a loss, so we four went abroad for 
 the joy of Mr. Burdette s first trip in foreign lands, for 
 a post-graduate course for the older son, and a better 
 preparation for college life for the younger son, and my 
 joy in all three and a visit to many old scenes of travel. 
 
 It was on this, his first ocean going trip, that he 
 wrote a letter to his " flock" and dated it "Some dis 
 tance out in the damp" and then assured them that 
 246 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 the scenery along this route, although somewhat monotonous, 
 is daily irrigated, but it seems too early for growing crops. 
 Nothing has come up yet except on shipboard, and that has 
 gone overboard. The route is not nearly so populous as the 
 Santa Fe trail over the desert. We have just two kinds of 
 days the days we see a ship and the days we don t. 
 
 During the year we spent our time in England; in 
 Scotland; in France during the Paris Exposition; in 
 Switzerland for some months in a chalet at Lucerne; 
 in Italy and Southern Italy for the holiday time; in 
 Egypt up the Nile; to Palestine for a horseback tour; 
 through the Mediterranean to Greece; over to Vienna; 
 back to Paris; to London; to New York; the finest 
 investment that was ever made in a year s time for the 
 preparation of the life work of each of the men. During 
 that time Mr. Burdette contributed weekly letters 
 home, which were printed throughout the United 
 States and which contained some of the most interest 
 ing bits of travel description that his fertile imagina 
 tion and clever pen could portray. These he often 
 began with some little poem which struck the key-note 
 of the letter, and for one of these he wrote the poem 
 that has been more largely republished than any other 
 except the poem "Alone ": 
 
 "KEEP SWEET AND KEEP MOVIN " 
 
 Homely phrase of our southland bright 
 
 Keep steady step to the flam of the drum; 
 Touch to the left eyes to the right 
 
 Sing with the soul tho the lips be dumb. 
 Hard to be good when the wind s in the east; 
 
 Hard to be gay when the heart is down, 
 When "they that trouble you are increased", 
 When you look for a smile and see a frown. 
 
 But 
 " Keep sweet and keep movin ." 
 
 247 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Sorrow will shade the blue sky gray 
 
 Gray is the color our brothers wore; 
 
 Azure will gleam in the skies once more. 
 Colors of Patience and Hope are they 
 Sunshine will scatter the clouds away; 
 
 Always at even in one they blend; 
 Tinting the heavens by night and day, 
 
 Over our hearts to the journey s end 
 
 Just 
 " Keep sweet and keep movin ." 
 
 Hard to be sweet when the throng is dense, 
 
 When elbows jostle and shoulders crowd; 
 Easy to give and to take offense 
 
 When the touch is rough and the voice is loud; 
 "Keep to the right" in the city s throng; 
 
 "Divide the road" on the broad highway; 
 There s one way right when every thing s wrong; 
 
 " Easy and fair goes far in a day." 
 
 Just 
 " Keep sweet and keep movin ." 
 
 The quick taunt answers the hasty word 
 
 The lifetime chance for a "help" is missed; 
 The muddiest pool is a fountain stirred. 
 
 A kind hand clenched makes an ugly fist. 
 When the nerves are tense and the mind is vexed, 
 
 The spark lies close to the magazine; 
 Whisper a hope to the soul perplexed 
 
 Banish the fear with a smile serene 
 
 Just 
 " Keep sweet and keep movin ." 
 
 Mr. Burdette s constant joy at new and unusual 
 scenes was unbounded. His well-stored memory of 
 historic events greatly enriched each scene visited, and 
 his marvelous and accurate familiarity with the Bible 
 made the trip through Palestine a revelation and a 
 source of information and inspiration most unusual. 
 248 
 
THE BURDETTE PARTY IN THE HOLY LAND 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 Each night as we gathered in the tent, he simply opened 
 the Bible and read to us as if it were a guide book, the 
 events that had taken place in the regions which we 
 had traversed that day. He himself so often gave 
 unconscious evidence in the after years of his sermons 
 of what he absorbed and gave out in most vivifying 
 statements and presentation of gospel truth, based upon 
 historic setting, that I aways felt this trip was a provi 
 dential preparation for the work he was to assume in 
 the later years, so often considered radically different 
 from his previous life work. 
 
 His letters to personal friends were to them a "joy 
 forever " and are preserved until this day. A letter to 
 his father from Lucerne, Switzerland, September 19, 
 1900, described Oberammergau: 
 
 And then the day following, we went on to Oberammergau 
 and witnessed its famous "Passion Play", discussed and 
 esteemed in as many ways as there are people who have wit 
 nessed it. Whatever you may think of its effect and teaching, 
 you are completely under the power of it while you look and 
 listen. 
 
 In the year 1633 a fearful pestilence broke out in the villages 
 of these mountains of Bavaria. It came within nine miles of 
 Oberammergau, in the village of Kohlgrub, where but two 
 married people were left alive, and in spite of all measures 
 began to creep into the village of Oberammergau. 
 
 Within 33 days, 84 people died. Then the helpless villagers 
 vowed that if God would take away the pestilence, they would 
 perform the Passion Tragedy in thanksgiving every ten years. 
 "And the Lord repented him of the evil, and said to the angel 
 that destroyed the people, It is enough; stay now thine hand. 
 And the angel of the Lord was by the threshing place of Arauna, 
 the Jebusite." 
 
 And so at Oberammergau, although a number of persons 
 were suffering with the plague when the vow was made, not 
 one died after that. The play was first performed in 1634, 
 and with some interruptions has been performed every ten 
 
 249 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 years ever since. It used to be presented in all simplicity out 
 of doors, in the churchyard, but of late years the increasing 
 attendance of tourists has necessitated other arrangements. 
 The "simple-minded villagers" have builded an auditorium 
 seating 4000 persons; at one end it is entirely open; the stage 
 is out of doors and there is a little space between the stage and 
 the auditorium, yet so perfect are the acoustics of this oddly 
 constructed house that every word from the stage is heard 
 clearly throughout the edifice. That is one wonder. 
 
 Another is, that these peasants, villagers, wood carvers and 
 servants, move on the stage with grace, majesty, dignity, such 
 as you rarely see in the pulpit or on the stage; there is nothing 
 affected or "stagey" about one of them. For the time, each 
 one seems to be the character he portrays. Another thing: 
 The play, which is a dramatic presentation of the closing- 
 week of the Saviour s life before the crucifixion, following the 
 Gospel story, is 8 hours on the stage, there being an interval 
 of an hour and a quarter at noon two acts of 4 hours each. 
 All that time the audience is held with almost breathless inter 
 est; there is no talking; no whispering; few people go out; 
 it is wonderful. 
 
 Now try to imagine any theatrical manager presenting an 
 attraction that would hold any audience 8 hours. It couldn t 
 be done. And the play has not a ripple of mirth, not one ray 
 of humor. It is earnest as life, solemn as death all the way 
 through. The scenes are lived over before you. The "Last 
 Supper" is the tenderest thing that I ever saw. Robbie sobbed 
 like a child over it, and the man had to be callous-hearted who 
 could sit through that scene dry-eyed. The play lasted all 
 Sunday from 8 A. M. to 5.30 P. M., and then the rush for the 
 cafes, in the little shops and on the sidewalks everywhere, was 
 tremendous, and the consumption of wine and beer went on 
 like a torrent till nine o clock at night; maybe later; I went to 
 sleep then. 
 
 This also is a comment on the moral effect of the play. 
 However, that didn t mean what it would in America. These 
 people drink wine and beer as we drink water. And right 
 here you will hear people tell you they had to drink wine and 
 beer in Europe because they could get no water. I haven t 
 seen a table in hotel, restaurant, or "pension" (you call that 
 250 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 pon-se-on, with the accent on the "pon", it means "boarding- 
 house") where the drinking water was not served as it is in 
 America. And the water is good, too; better than you get in 
 Philadelphia; doesn t have to be boiled any more than it does 
 in Chicago. That excuse is a lie in every letter; four drink 
 nothing but water, and never have the slightest trouble getting 
 it. Americans who drink wine and beer in Europe do so because 
 they want to, not because they have to. 
 
 To Erasmus Wilson he wrote from Rome, Decem 
 ber, 17, 1900: 
 
 DEAR MAN, 
 
 By the time this reaches you, the 19th and 20th centuries 
 will have settled their dispute, so here s a Happy New Year 
 and A Happy New Century to you the only man I know 
 who is big enough to require a whole century for a New Year 
 greeting. And it won t be a mis-fit, either. If you had all 
 of the New Century allotted to you that you deserve, there 
 would be 200 years in it, and every day will be Christmas. 
 
 Well, you ll get all that Christmasses and all, "one of 
 these days". What a long day it will be with the sun always 
 hanging about half-past five waiting for the twilight that 
 comes after "office hours" the time when "school is out" 
 and the children go trooping home. 
 
 We gray-haired old boys, going slowly up the long slope 
 of the hill over which the sun is resting, and behind which is 
 home and the twilight and the stars. Won t you be glad 
 when "School is out", dear old Boy? I will, and I won t. 
 For I ve got to carry my books home. They re badly "dog s 
 eared", but I won t mind that; that comes of study. And 
 they re torn pretty badly, but I won t mind that; I got that 
 done fighting. But there s ink marks and stains on so many 
 pages. That I m sorry for there s no excuse for that. Good 
 bye! Just got to thinkin of you, and sat down to send you a 
 hail and I ve turned it into a wail. A Long Happy New Year. 
 
 Yours as ever, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 To his father he wrote from Venice, concerning the 
 fall elections: 
 
 251 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 November 6th, 7 P. M. Well, you haven t got through the 
 battle yet, it is about 11 A. M. in Chicago the difference in 
 time is eight hours, but we are safe in Venice. This morning 
 I prepared four ballots for McKinley and Roosevelt, and we 
 all four, including the minor and the woman, marched solemnly 
 across the piazzeta, which is a part of St. Mark s Square, and 
 gravely deposited our ballots in the Royal Italian letter box 
 under the shadow of the Doges Palace and the column of St. 
 Mark s. This evening we know that McKinley s majority in 
 Venice is four over all, and Bryan hasn t got a vote in this 
 silver stronghold. And it is silver, sure enough. The rate of 
 exchange on gold is about sixteen per cent. 
 
 I am incubating a new lecture. I call it "Rainbow 
 Chasers". I m one. The "aig" is fair to look upon, but 
 you never can tell what may happen to a negg. Duck, maybe, 
 when you want a fighting cock, or a tiny little piccolo of a 
 bantam, when you prayed for a great basso-profundo of a 
 Shanghai that could eat his corn off the head of a barrel. 
 
 Returning to Paris and a visit to Versailles, his 
 father received, under date of May 7, 1901, a letter in 
 which Mr. Burdette graphically portrays the Con 
 tinental Sunday as he saw it: 
 
 And every time the grand fountain plays, it costs the 
 Republic of France 10,000 francs. So you see? Fountains 
 and fountains and fountains statues of marble and bronze 
 nymph and triton and god art and beauty and grace ah, 
 but they are beautiful. The jets of the Grandes Eaux are 
 75 feet high. There is nothing at least no single piece equal 
 to the MacMonnies fountain at our Columbian Fair. But the 
 number and variety of them, scattered through the beauty of 
 this beautiful park, makes you "doubt if Eden were more fair". 
 
 Thirty-five thousand people were gathered around the 
 fountain. About a thousand or fifteen hundred private soldiers 
 of all arms of the service were scattered among them. Not 
 armed, but on their holiday. Although all soldiers here in 
 Europe wear their side arms all the time, the troopers and 
 artillery-men their sabers, and the infantry men their bayonets, 
 you never see one without them. 
 252 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 These people wandered thro the picture galleries and 
 about the gardens all day, and thronged about the fountains 
 when they began to play. They gathered around them half 
 an hour before they began. A quiet, orderly decorous crowd. 
 No drunkenness. Not a drunken or a noisy man in the throng. 
 No shouting. No rowdyism. No boisterous conduct. I 
 couldn t see or hear anything un-Sunday like in the park. Well, 
 yes, I did too. 
 
 I remembered how Sunday after Sunday the tally-hos 
 drive out from Los Angeles, loaded with tourists and Los 
 Angeles people; how they drive thro Pasadena, blowing horns 
 and shouting, disturbing the service in every church past 
 which they drive, and making more noise in half an hour than 
 I heard all day Sunday long in^the Park at Versailles. I don t 
 think that we can safely introduce the French Sunday into 
 America. I don t think, as a whole, the French Sunday is so 
 good as our own. But, I do think that some features of it far 
 surpass some features of our own. 
 
 It makes a man a much better American to spend a 
 year among other peoples. It also increases his respect 
 for the other peoples. And it convinces him that while 
 we know the most, we don t know it all. There wasn t a 
 band in the park. Not a blare or a bray of a horn, to amuse 
 all that crowd of people. And not a bar. And not a beer- 
 stand. 
 
 I tell you what, that Sunday in Versailles Park made a 
 great big finger dent in my mind. I haven t got over thinking 
 of it yet. It was without one exception, the quietest, most 
 orderly, best behaved crowd of that size I ever saw in my life. 
 
 Returning to America, the older boy took up news 
 paper work and the younger boy entered Harvard in 
 the class graduating in 1905. Mr. Burdette and I re 
 turned to California, with the plan that he should take 
 up work in his own study, doing more truly literary 
 work and less public work, to the end that there might 
 be an output in permanent form of expression of his 
 literary gifts such as he had been unable hitherto to 
 compile, 
 
 253 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 But it seemed as if Providence was ordering things 
 otherwise. This dream of the years when he should be 
 able to devote his time to this so-called higher style of 
 literature was not to be fulfilled, for soon after our 
 return, a committee waited upon him to inform him 
 that a certain group of Baptists of Los Angeles were 
 considering the formation of a new church, upon the 
 provision that he would consent to become their pastor. 
 There seemed to be a legitimate field for a new church 
 in spite of the number of Baptist churches already 
 there, because of a large number of unattached Bap 
 tists, and those who for personal reasons were unhappy 
 in their church relationships, and the appeal was made 
 to him that here was a service for which he had dis 
 tinctive gifts, the ability to love them into harmony. 
 
 This was a very serious undertaking at his time of 
 life. He had passed what was then called the "dead 
 line" of the pulpit, and had had little experience in all 
 that goes to make a successful pastor. It involved 
 giving up of a life of comparative ease for one of stren 
 uous activity, with the distance intervening between 
 his home in Pasadena and the scene of his church activ 
 ity in Los Angeles. 
 
 I, who was afterwards to be known as the "Pres 
 byterian wife of the Baptist Pastor", felt that he alone 
 must make the decision. I had no right to stand in the 
 way of what might be under God his largest life oppor 
 tunity for service. My only expression concerning the 
 suggestion was simply to the end that if he, after proper 
 consideration, felt that this was the work for him to do, 
 I would with all my power assist him, but the problem 
 was his and I suggested that he consider it for ten days. 
 
 At the end of the week he came to me, saying, "I 
 have prayerfully considered this matter and feel it is 
 254 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 the work for me to undertake, but I cannot do it with 
 out your intimate help. You are so capable to supply 
 my lack of executive ability and organization exper 
 ience, that I cannot attempt it unless you are willing 
 to make the sacrifice which I feel I have no right to ask 
 of you." 
 
 There was but one answer to be made and the oppor 
 tunity was given me to demonstrate my oft-asserted 
 belief that there is no greater work given to a wife to do 
 than to help her husband make a success of a great life 
 undertaking. 
 
 So "the church which we builded together" became 
 the most precious thing in his life, save his loved ones, 
 and the last to fade from memory as life itself was 
 waning. 
 
 This decision to turn from the ease of self-imposed 
 tasks at his desk, environed by the comforts of leisure 
 home life, and assume responsibilities that were new, 
 that were necessarily to be demanding and constantly 
 insistent, that multiplied with every new accomplish 
 ment, was destined to open the way for what he declared 
 should be "the crowning work of my life". 
 
 Bubbling over with love for mankind, rich in the 
 understanding of human needs and human weaknesses, 
 master of the art of arousing the sympathies and emo 
 tions, he not only played upon the vibrant strings of 
 the human heart as a Jester does his bells, but the very 
 chords of the soul he touched with the stroke of spiritual 
 genius, and his sweetness of life and gospel left an inher 
 itance of love to his fellowmen. He preached the living 
 word. He vitalized and made modern old truths. He 
 radiated sunshine, and men followed the light. He 
 was the inspiration for Temple Baptist Church; he was 
 the inspiration of Temple Baptist Church. No pastor 
 
 255 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 was more deeply loved than was he, and no people ever 
 received the outpouring and wealth of affection that he 
 bestowed on "my children", many of whom in turn 
 called him "Padre". 
 
 Two questions are often asked and naturally so, 
 "Why did Robert J. Burdette leave the lecture plat 
 form to become a preacher and what is his creed?" 
 He has answered them himself in this fashion that 
 he was not drawn to the pulpit by any love of ease, for 
 the lyceum with its changing audiences, its shifting 
 scenes of travel, and the half-dozen lectures that would 
 last the rest of his life-time was far lighter work than 
 the pulpit with its demand for two new sermons each 
 week, and its daily round of pastoral duties making 
 heavy drains upon strength of body, brain, soul and 
 sympathy. 
 
 Nor was it for hope of gain, for the income for the 
 lyceum winter far surpassed the annual salary of the 
 pastorate. Moreover, he was just ready for a few 
 years rest, and had passed the "ministerial dead line" 
 of fifty years. Why should he enter the ministry with 
 never a day of so-called theological education or sem 
 inary training? A half-organized Church waiting upon 
 his answer cried, "Come!" People whom he thought 
 he might help in their troubles, and cares, and doubts, 
 and sorrows, called to him, "Come!" And the voice 
 of God whispered in his soul, "Go!" 
 
 This same spirit was breathed in a sentence uttered 
 in a prayer after he became a pastor, uttered perhaps 
 unconsciously to himself, which has lived in the mind of 
 one listener as the exponent of his call to the ministry: 
 "0 Lord, we would reach one hand up to Thee and 
 one down to poor, fallen, struggling humanity and thus 
 draw each to the other." And his creed? Again he 
 
 256 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 makes answer, " Love is the fulfillment of the Law/ 
 Love, and love alone brought Jesus Christ from heaven 
 to men; and only love can lift men to heaven/ 
 
 When asked what was his secret for attracting men 
 his deep-meaning reply was, "Preaching the simple 
 Gospel. Men do not want philosophical treatises and 
 literary essays; they want more evangelism/ 
 
 Again, Mr. Burdette declared: 
 
 I believe in old-fashioned preaching, but old-fashioned preach 
 ing is not obsolete preaching. When this kind of preaching 
 was new it was up-to-date. It drew lessons from every-day 
 life what more do we. Illustrate with stories some other 
 people like not always the kind that will pleasure yourself. 
 Some people once explained to me about the binding of a very 
 old book until I began to go to sleep. Then to save myself, 
 I began to talk about the inside of the book and they went to 
 sleep. If occasion comes to use humor, do so. I would rather 
 make people laugh than cry. They do enough crying any way. 
 If you want to use such little extravagancies of speech as "The 
 everlasting hills melt away" there is no harm. What you want 
 is to catch the interest of your audience and make the people 
 listen. Then tell them the simple story of the Gospel in a 
 manner that will convince them. 
 
 And in an article contributed by him to a religious 
 publication he says under the caption, "This same 
 Jesus": 
 
 " I believe the greatest theme on earth at this time is the study, 
 the declaration and exaltation of the character and divinity of 
 Jesus Christ, the Saviour of men, the Son of God, the second 
 person of the Trinity. There is that in the description and 
 proclamation, the divine and human portraiture of Jesus that 
 awakens the sincerest interest in the human mind, the tenderest 
 love in the human heart, and the profoundest reverence in the 
 human soul. Jesus Christ and Him crucified and glorified, 
 His humanity and His Divinity this be our theme. Men 
 will respond to this, to the presentation of the personality of 
 Jesus Christ as they will to no other thought." 
 
 IT 257 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 These deep and spiritual convictions were not born 
 of the moment. They were the harvest of the years of 
 God s spirit working within the human soul. 
 
 Though called upon suddenly to take up this crown 
 ing work of his life, he possessed preparation for it by 
 the enrichment of a life of varied experiences and by a 
 legacy from his Baptist ancestors of two centuries of 
 pulpit orators. 
 
 That his first ministry should be the denomination 
 of his father, was the fulfillment of his reply to a young 
 preacher who once asked him why he was a Baptist: 
 
 I am a Baptist by heredity. My Welsh ancestors were 
 Baptist preachers, and there has been an unbroken line of 
 Baptist preachers in the family down to the present day. And 
 my father s people were Baptists of the old Huguenot stock. 
 If I wanted to be any other than a Baptist I couldn t be. I 
 was born one. I love the Universalists and the Russians, I 
 love the Congregationalists and Prussians and Methodists; I 
 love the Presbyterians and the English; but I was born a 
 Baptist and an American, and that settles it. 
 
 Moreover, I love the beautiful symbolism of the ordinance 
 of the Baptist church. I love a baptism that does not have 
 to be argued, defended or explained, but is in itself such a living 
 picture of burial and resurrection that even a blind eye must 
 close itself if it would not see. And I love the creed that is 
 written nowhere but in the New Testament, which allows for 
 growth which, indeed, demands steady growth. I love the 
 simplicity of the Baptist organization. I love the democratic 
 churches. And I love the Baptist recognition of the right of 
 "private judgment", the liberty of personal opinion. I love 
 the free responsibility of the human soul, standing face to face 
 with God, with no shadow of pope or bishop or priest or man- 
 made creed falling between himself and his Maker. That s 
 why I am a Baptist. 
 
 Temple Baptist Church, organized by laymen with 
 a layman called to be its pastor (for Mr. Burdette was 
 then only licensed and had not yet been ordained), was 
 258 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 to be known as a laymen s church and destined for a 
 unique history. 
 
 To say that Temple Baptist Church was organized 
 with 285 charter members and grew under his pastorate 
 to be 1069 strong, with a congregation of three thou 
 sand people twice every Sunday; to say that the Sun 
 day School started fully officered and organized with 
 175 pupils and 18 officers and teachers the first morning 
 and grew to nearly 1000 in six years; to indicate the 
 "wanderings in the wilderness" from the occupancy of 
 the recently vacated Congregational Church with a 
 seating capacity of only 1200, the old Hazard s Pavilion 
 which was finally to be demolished that the new church 
 home might be constructed, the worship meanwhile in 
 the crowded old Masonic Temple, which again forced 
 a march to the Los Angeles armory building where for 
 six uncomfortable months worship was maintained 
 with ever-increasing membership, to the final dedica 
 tion of Berean Hall in Temple Auditorium, is to present 
 only a meager outline of the faith, courage and marvel 
 ous activity which the young church established in the 
 heart of the business life of a great, growing city. 
 
 In Mr. Burdette s first sermon before this new group 
 of already loyal workers and worshippers, delivered 
 July 26, 1903, preaching from the text, "Pray for the 
 peace of Jerusalem; they shall prosper that love Thee", 
 he bade them 
 
 come to this church, bring with you love, and peace, and the 
 name of Christ, and you shall depart in peace and love. Come 
 here with the hurts of your life; come with the bitterness of 
 your defeats; come with the smart of your disappointments, 
 with the crumbling hopes that lie in ashes. Come with us, 
 and prayer and blessing shall meet you at the Threshold, the 
 one as sweet as the other is sure. "They shall prosper that 
 love Thee." 
 
 259 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 With the first service the Diadem was sung, as we 
 had heard it sung in England, and from that time to 
 this the morning service is opened with the Diadem, 
 which carries the mind like a shaft of sunlight to the 
 upper skies. 
 
 Rev. George Thomas Dowling, then rector of Christ 
 Episcopal Church, early made public his congratula 
 tions to the citizens of Los Angeles in general and 
 Baptist churches in particular, on the acquisition to 
 the city clergy of Mr. Burdette, saying: 
 
 He stands for that which we all need, whether in the church or 
 out of it, perhaps as much as anything else personified sun 
 shine. For twenty years I have known him in the East. We 
 have traveled together, eaten together, slept together, and 
 lectured together; and of all the men whom I have ever known, 
 I have never met one more kindly toward everyone, more 
 tender in his judgments of the weak and the fallen, more like 
 the Master whom he preaches. 
 
 With this nature as a background of all effort, there 
 is little wonder that he was instrumental in bringing 
 the answer of his own earnest and oft-repeated prayer, 
 "Dear Father, make this a spiritual church, controlled 
 by love". 
 
 Up to this time Mr. Burdette had been only a 
 licensed preacher of the Baptist Church and both him 
 self and his people desiring full ordination, a council 
 was called and a date fixed for considering the recog 
 nition of the church and the ordination of the pastor, 
 August 13, 1903, the council consisting of 47 delegates 
 representing 38 churches and 30 pastors and 8 visitors, 
 who formally recognized the Temple Baptist Church and 
 before a crowded auditorium confirmed Mr. Burdette s 
 qualifications for the pulpit and assured fitness for the 
 pastorate. 
 
 260 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 Mr. Burdette always maintained that the Baptist 
 Church stood pre-eminently for soul liberty, for the 
 freedom of conscience and individual opinion, and he 
 emphasized his beliefs when those examining him 
 pressed him for the stereotyped seminary answers to 
 the usual test questions. 
 
 Here was a new experience for most of these church 
 men to question one who handled more audiences in 
 a year than they had in all their ministry, who had 
 moved more hearts in one lecture season than they had 
 looked down upon in all their preaching years, and who 
 fearlessly answered their questions with surprising 
 frankness. 
 
 Little wonder that when some impossible theological 
 question was asked, the wit of the candidate carried 
 him over all the rough places to the occasional dis 
 comfiture of his examiners. 
 
 During the cross-examination from the floor, which 
 was long and exacting, occasional flashes of humor came 
 to the surface that reminded the brethren with whom 
 they were dealing and enlivened the proceedings to a 
 delightful degree. 
 
 One dignified brother asked the candidate a ques 
 tion on a knotty point, and he answered: "I do not 
 know; can you answer that question yourself?" 
 
 "I answered that question twenty years ago at my 
 own ordination," said the dignified brother. 
 
 "But I was not there to hear it," was the quick 
 reply. 
 
 It was about at this stage that Dr. A. J. Frost rose 
 up to the full height of his majestic 6 feet 4 inches, and, 
 in his terrible bass voice, remarked: "It ought to be 
 understood that no one is to ask a question in this 
 council that he is not able to answer himself." 
 
 261 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 This of course brought down the house. 
 
 Mr. Burdette admitted that his views as to the final 
 disposition of the wicked dead were not exactly in 
 accord with commonly accepted views on that point 
 among Baptists, and that his private interpretation of 
 questions concerning communion were such as were 
 held by the English Baptists. This latter opinion he 
 elucidated in a sermon a month later, on the text "This 
 do in remembrance of me", in which he said: 
 
 A "sacrament" we call the "Lord s Supper", that is, a 
 sign and an oath, "sacramentum" the oath of allegiance 
 which the Roman soldier took on his enlistment. It is "an 
 outward and visible sign of an inward grace"; the pledge by 
 which we bind our souls to the Lord. And we call it the " Lord s 
 Supper", because it was instituted by our dear Lord Jesus; it 
 was at the evening time, and at the close of the Passover supper. 
 
 We call it "the communion" because here we commune 
 with Christ and His people, our brethren; it is spoken of as 
 the "Eucharist", "a thanksgiving", because in the institution 
 of it, Jesus gave thanks as He broke the bread and poured the 
 wine. He did not "bless" the bread and wine. Matthew, 
 Mark and Luke tell us of the institution of the supper, and 
 Paul tells how by special revelation he also received of the 
 Lord Jesus the story of the supper and the manner of its observ 
 ance. John gives us conversation and the last discourse. 
 
 And among the many sweet and beautiful ideas which 
 cluster about this, the holiest place on earth, there occurs to 
 you the social thought; it is the assembling of the household 
 of faith; at the Lord s table; upon His own invitation. The 
 gathering of the family. 
 
 We sit here side by side with brothers and sisters whose 
 faces, it may be, we have never seen before, and whom we may 
 never meet again until our Lord shall drink the fruit of the 
 vine new with us in His Father s kingdom; yet are we all of 
 the one household. At no other place in all the worship and 
 service of the church are thoughts of denominational differ 
 ences of creed and method of ordinance pushed farther away 
 from our hearts. It is His table; and we, present ourselves as 
 
 262 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 His guests, come with no thought in our hearts save of the love 
 of Jesus, our crucified and risen Saviour, who meets with us. 
 
 He was ordained in spite of the sentiment expressed 
 on the part of one of the church papers in reporting the 
 council meeting, which said: 
 
 Questions are supposed to issue from the council to the candi 
 date and not from the candidate to the council. We do not 
 remember to have heard of a case, heretofore, where one pro 
 fessing to hold views of baptism and the supper differing from 
 those of the denomination at large in this country, was ordained 
 to the ministry. It is allowed laymen to hold different views, 
 provided they do not attempt to propagate them; but it is 
 not allowed candidates for the ministry to profess them at 
 ordination. 
 
 Mr. Burdette made a most favorable impression 
 before the council. His account of his conversion and 
 call to the ministry was so simple, and true to the best 
 traditions, that all hearts were deeply moved. His 
 statement of doctrines and church polity was not made 
 in the language of the schools, but showed clearly that 
 the candidate was familiar with his Bible and was true 
 as steel to the great fundamental facts of inspiration, 
 God s sovereign love, Jesus receiving penalty in the 
 sinner s stead, the efficacy of the atoning blood, and 
 the absolute necessity of a converted church member 
 ship. 
 
 Rev. A. J. Frost performed the ceremony of "Laying 
 on of hands" and delivered the charge to the Pastor. 
 He smilingly said: "Never be ashamed of being a 
 Baptist. You are a Baptist. I thank God that what 
 there is of you is Baptist." 
 
 The learned Doctor is perhaps the largest man 
 physically in the whole Baptist communion; and Mr. 
 Burdette stood 5 feet 4 inches. So when this great 
 
 263 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 man, from his towering height, looked down upon the 
 new preacher, it could not fail to cause some amuse 
 ment, but the people of Temple Church declared they 
 would not have exchanged the "Little Minister". No! 
 Not for the biggest man in the world! 
 
 The benediction was pronounced by Rev. Robert 
 J. Burdette, and this man, known as editor, humorous 
 lecturer, poet, writer, soldier, as well as an exponent of 
 many other lines of life, stood changed or unchanged 
 according to the verdict of the outer or inner life into 
 a regular Baptist preacher. Three years later he was 
 to have conferred upon him by the Theological Semi 
 nary of Kalamazoo the degree of Doctor of Divinity, 
 thus rounding out a long life of rich and varied exper 
 iences. 
 
 Through three years of wandering, made necessary 
 by the ever-increasing congregations which overflowed 
 each auditorium secured for church services, and under 
 the most distracting conditions a young church ever 
 experienced, Mr. Burdette s optimism, cheer and faith 
 led them joyously, following the motto he early gave 
 them, "Keep sweet and keep moving". 
 
 When Berean Hall, which was destined to be a 
 prayer-meeting room, Sunday School room and general 
 working center of Temple Church, was dedicated July 29, 
 1906, the pastor, standing on the platform, faced a happy- 
 hearted audience and preached the dedication sermon 
 with the sunshine of his own heart shining through the 
 windows of his soul. There was a feeling that it might 
 have been this occasion that inspired Julian Hawthorne 
 to write: 
 
 Mr. Burdette has the look of a man who is happy in his work. 
 All true work lovingly done is good. But the work of the Chris 
 tian Minister, in spite of all those professors of it who have 
 
 264 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 swerved from the direct path, or who have listened to strange 
 counsels, or compromised in one way or another with the 
 enemy, is still the highest work of all, for whose who are com 
 petent to do it. The man who is happy in it must therefore 
 be a man with a genuine message, to whom it is worth one s 
 while to listen, who merits respect. 
 
 And when the inward call has been so powerful as to draw 
 him away in mature years from an established place and path 
 in life, it seems to give him a distinction altogether exceptional. 
 From ancient down to modern times, there have never been 
 lacking men of this distinction and their renown is part of 
 history. Mr. Burdette was of their company. And those 
 who listened to his voice might well believe that a truth found 
 utterance through him, purer and sounder than often heard 
 from latter day pulpits. 
 
 It was this "little man, born with the genius for 
 loving", that made possible the three years history 
 which could be thus condensed: 
 
 Temple Church, born amid adverse circumstances, without 
 a name, without a home, without a pastor, she today, after 
 three years wilderness journey, stands within the walls of her 
 own home, beautiful for situation, with a name known far and 
 near, a pastor beloved in many lands, her back to the struggles 
 of the past and her face to the glorious future that God has 
 marked out for her if she but follow Him. "Only be strong 
 and very courageous for the Lord my God is with thee whither 
 soever thou goest." 
 
 At the dedication of the Auditorium itself by the 
 Temple Baptist Church, who took possession of it as 
 their Sabbath home Sunday morning, November 1, 
 1908, Mr. Burdette used these words, which might 
 have been an epitome of his own efforts through life: 
 
 To the sweetest ministry of music; to the highest ideals of 
 art; to the education of the body, mind and soul; to the train 
 ing of the best citizenship and the truest patriotism; to the 
 strongest manhood and the purest womanhood; to the brother- 
 
 265 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 hood of man, the fellowship of righteousness, the fatherhood of 
 God, and the teaching and living of the whole gospel of Jesus 
 Christ, His Son, the Saviour of Men; to the training of all that 
 is best and truest in daily toil, in wholesome recreation, inno 
 cent amusement, and Sabbath rest and worship; to the sacred 
 unity of the home; to the holiness of family ties; to the pro 
 motion of temperance, chastity, truth and righteousness, we, 
 the congregation of Temple Baptist church, dedicate this house. 
 In the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen. 
 
 This dedication was followed by such a petition that 
 there seemed to be the commitment of God and man to 
 the great purpose: 
 
 Thou Great Master of the Temple, we pray for a blessing 
 wide as Thy mercy and deep as Thy love upon this Church of 
 Thy planting. Be Thou its eternal Refuge, Dear God, the 
 Mighty. A shadow from the heat, a shelter from the storm. 
 Enfold it in Thy enduring love as with a garment of light. 
 Make it abide in Thy love, Dear Christ Jesus, our Saviour. 
 May it ever dwell under the blessings of Thy cross, in the 
 shelter of Thy Arms. Be Thou to it a shield in the day of 
 battle; a guide in the weary maze of the wilderness of doubts 
 and fears. Keep it from the evil of the world. Teach it day 
 by day to labor in Thy words, to rest in Thy prayers. Make 
 its way bright with faith, its burdens light with love. Teach 
 it to pray, Dear Lord. Teach it to live. Teach it to love. 
 May it gaze so constantly on Thy face that its face will grow 
 into Thy likeness, not by the change of death, Dear Lord, but 
 by the transforming power of the highest, noblest, purest and 
 truest life. Thy blessing forever upon this dear Church. 
 
 The power of the word and the preacher behind it, 
 and that without sensational attractions, drew more 
 than capacity audiences, and the necessity, even with 
 this increased seating capacity, of turning people away 
 from each service Sunday after Sunday, was a constant 
 regret to Mr. Burdette; not that he vainly wished to 
 have record-breaking congregations, but that with 
 266 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 simple spiritual earnestness he prayerfully sought to 
 "draw all men unto Him" whom he loved and served. 
 That his prayer was not in vain was proven through 
 the years of his pastorate by the fact that every bap 
 tismal Sunday found candidates ready for baptism; 
 every prayer-meeting night new applicants were pre 
 sented for membership and every communion Sunday 
 large numbers received the right hand of fellowship. 
 
 That this Sunday home of Temple Church was in 
 an auditorium, used for other purposes during the 
 week, brought from those who cared much for conven 
 tional material church buildings, honest words of 
 criticism. While it was true that the Sunday School 
 rooms, the parlors, the club-rooms and the workshop 
 of the church were for the church only and that there 
 were 126 offices in the building, rented for the most 
 part to physicians, that there might be an assured 
 income for the Auditorium Company, the members of 
 Temple Church owning less than one-third of the stock 
 of the company this double use of the auditorium was 
 not all that might be desired by those whose church 
 homes had been closed to the public all but one day in 
 the week. Mr. Burdette s years of peculiar training 
 fitted him, as few preachers were ever prepared, to 
 overcome all these unusual conditions and to turn the 
 very difficulties of the situation to great advantage. 
 
 The church activities which could so bless the com 
 munity life of the downtown heart of a great city were 
 thus directed by one preeminently fitted to attract and 
 hold the transient, homeless people, as well as those 
 who permanently abided within the city; for was he 
 not often called "Pilgrim s Progress Mr. Great Heart?" 
 Mr. Burdette s reply to these critics was given in a 
 sermon on "Consecrated Places", and is so character- 
 
 267 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 istic of his attitude towards life, his fearlessness of "the 
 brethren", and his fighting spirit in the cause of right 
 eousness, that I quote at length: 
 
 Last week a man sent me this message: "How dare you 
 presume to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in a theater?" 
 
 I don t preach in a theater. I would like to, sometimes, 
 but the theater people will not permit it. I preach the gospel 
 in a fitting place. We are assembled this moment in what is 
 commonly called a church. This is a consecrated house of 
 worship, consecrated, so far as man can consecrate any place, 
 by the speaking lips and reverent hearts of 3000 people, "to 
 the brotherhood of man, the fellowship of righteousness, the 
 fatherhood of God, the teaching and living of the whole gospel 
 of Jesus .Christ, His Son, our Saviour." I not only dare 
 preach that gospel anywhere, but I must preach it every 
 where. 
 
 God called Moses to his mighty mission out of the flaming 
 acacia bush in the desert, without first having the bush conse 
 crated and the ground made holy by an organization of men and 
 women with psalm and chant, with liturgy and ritual and with 
 words of consecration falling from human lips with all the 
 pomp and humility, the splendor and simplicity of a religious 
 service. 
 
 We come together sometimes, we men, to build a house to 
 the name of God and we say it shall be sacred to holy things, 
 to holy thoughts and to holy lives. To that end we hold a 
 solemn assemblage at the laying of the corner stone and a 
 service of consecration when the sacred edifice is completed. 
 With words of praise and hearts of reverence we do all that 
 is in human power to make the building sacred to His name, 
 and we go home satisfied that we have consecrated the house 
 of God; we have, we, with hearts that are sometimes foul, 
 sometimes black dens of evil thoughts and low desires, minds 
 that are at times charnel houses of ignorance; we have conse 
 crated a church, we have made a house holy. 
 
 Men consecrated a house to God one time the first house 
 ever builded to His name and under His own direction. They 
 made it as holy as men could make anything, with song and 
 praise and music of instruments, with ascription of righteous- 
 208 
 
THE AUDITORIUM, Los ANGELES, HOME OF TEMPLE BAPTIST CHURCH 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 ness and holiness to God, with a high priest slaying the sacrifice, 
 offering the people s oblation, the sin offering, the sacrifice of 
 peace offerings, fire from God consuming all that was offered 
 upon the altar, and in an instant the service turned into an 
 hour of terror by the flame of Jehovah s wrath devouring the 
 sons of the high priest, who had offered strange fire before the 
 altars. The unholiness of men carrying strange fire in their 
 hearts, false worship in their souls, hypocrisy in their thoughts, 
 can make unholy the holiest place that human hands have 
 formally consecrated to divine worship and service. 
 
 I suppose that the people who object to religious services 
 in the Auditorium can see nothing holy, sacred or pure around 
 the corner of First and Main Streets, or down on Azusa Street, 
 anywhere in the slum district, amidst a cordon of saloons, of 
 vile houses populated with vile people, localities given over to 
 vice in its lowest form. But I have seen, and any one may see, 
 those places made holy, consecrated to God even as the white 
 altar, radiant in its illuminating candles in a grand cathedral, 
 by a little circle of the children of God, a song of praise and 
 entreaty shouted amidst the noises of the street on a week 
 night by untrained voices, a girl in the dress of a Salvation 
 Army lassie, kneeling in the street and praying for the careless, 
 sneering throng hurrying by her on the way to the theater or 
 saloon or gaming house. That is consecrated ground. 
 
 Here is a dance hall, viler and lower than mere human 
 imagination can paint it in its degradation and sin, and into 
 it, without the prayers of consecration by a titled dignitary, 
 without the services of a recognized church, comes a man 
 whose own unholy, drink-sodden body God has transformed 
 into a beautiful temple of the Holy Spirit, and Jerry McCauley s 
 Mission will live forever in the record of the churches that 
 "overcome". He preached where sin most abounded, that 
 grace might still more abound. 
 
 Do you remember the old "Pavilion", that came to be 
 best known as the home of prize fights? Do you remember 
 where it stood? Somehow, when I speak of it, I always have 
 to stop and think where it was. Do you remember its old 
 reputation, when it was the only home of prize fighting, dog 
 shows, chicken shows, any old thing that was dirty and noisy 
 and smelly, in Los Angeles? What is this great concourse of 
 
 269 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 pilgrims from all over America, from the distant continent and 
 the islands of the sea converging toward the old Pavilion? It 
 is the great General Methodist Conference, and it occupies the 
 old barracks for a month, without any other consecration ser 
 vice than the very essential one of oceans of water and islands 
 of soap! Wasn t it a holy place during the hallelujah sessions 
 of that conference of God s people? 
 
 Then Chapman, the Presbyterian, came into it with his 
 soldiers of the cross, and we all wrought and prayed with him 
 and his yoke fellows. Sinners were saved; God s name was 
 glorified. Wasn t it holy then? Campbell Morgan, with his 
 rare, pure spirituality, came into it and all the churches of 
 Los Anglees sat under the blessedness of his ministry and the 
 saints were strengthened in the faith and made glad in the 
 Lord. Wasn t it holy then? Then Frederick B. Meyer came 
 over from London, and he preached the gospel of our Lord 
 with ineffable sweentess and light, and our souls were lifted 
 up into heavenly places in Christ Jesus as we listened. Wasn t 
 it a holy place then? Wasn t it a fit place in which to preach 
 the gospel of salvation? 
 
 Chapman, Morgan, Meyer, Bishop McCabe, Baptist, 
 Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, all preached the 
 gospel and brought sinners to Christ in it. Then, October 18, 
 1904, the last brutal prize fight was fought in it. The old 
 Pavilion was jammed to the roof. Profanity and obscenity, 
 yells of applause or derisions from the lips of half drunken men 
 roared through the crazy old barracks. 
 
 Then a little band of Christian men and women, strong in 
 faith and rich in love, bought the building; with stronger faith 
 they tore it down, and this glittering gem of beauty and grace 
 in the coronet of Los Angeles is an answer to the prayer ! Dare 
 I preach the gospel of the Blessed Lord in this Temple of light 
 and loveliness? So long as I may, I will! And let the man 
 who cries out against it, go down on Azusa Street, buy some 
 dive he can find down there, tear it down and on its unholy 
 ruins build for the good of men and the glory of God a Temple 
 of Grace like this! Then he may talk! 
 
 In this day of specialists and specialization, every 
 corporation and organization seeks the man who can 
 270 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 do best one thing and do one thing best. It seems left 
 to the churches at least, a vast majority of them to 
 seek the man who can do best everything and then 
 expect him to do everything best. He must not only 
 be the best preacher in town and the best pastor, but 
 there must be no one else who can bury their dead, 
 marry their living, visit the sick, comfort those in 
 trouble, represent them at all conventions and assem 
 blies, deliver addresses for all departments of the 
 Church, keep in touch with all the outside activities 
 that the Church should be a factor in, and, finally, as 
 at the beginning, he must be the best sermonizer in 
 the community. 
 
 This Mr. Burdette did and more, but with mar 
 velous physical powers in spite of his over-strenuous 
 life up to this his sixty-third year. With great versa 
 tility of talent and the rare ability to respond instantly 
 to utterly divergent demands, it became a physical 
 impossibility for him longer to administer the affairs 
 of a parish the territory of which covered more ground 
 than the state of Rhode Island and whose members 
 numbered well toward a thousand souls. In 1907 an 
 assistant pastor, Rev. Edwin Rawson Brown, was 
 called to the yoke-fellowship in the work, and at the 
 close of his first year of service Mr. Burdette s heartiness 
 and generosity of spirit were shown in his report to the 
 Church. 
 
 The "Open Door" to the Pastor s study on Wed 
 nesday afternoons, was possibly a greater service to 
 those "unattached" than to Temple members, and in 
 the records kept there is found the names of those who 
 repeatedly came for help, especially the names of young 
 men. 
 
 The letter of deep appreciation for encouragement 
 
 271 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 "along the way", a kind word, a cheery bit of advice, 
 a helpful deed, would fill a volume, and are worthy of 
 one because of their deep sincerity. "It was such a 
 little thing to do/ the Pastor would say; "but it meant 
 everything to me/ was the universal reply. 
 
 Mr. Burdette felt most intensely that in estimating 
 values by human life and human activities the richest 
 asset the church had was its children and its young 
 people. He feared for the child that was without the 
 Sunday School habit because of the peril of forming less 
 desirable habits and he earnestly prayed, "give us the 
 children "; make us all Bereans, that we may "search 
 the scriptures" daily. 
 
 Upon his suggestion that a Baptist Sunday School 
 was the Navy of the Lord, the superintendent, T. T. 
 Woodruff, enthusiastically took up the idea and organ 
 ized the Sunday School along nautical lines. The 
 pastor, who was to be known as the Admiral, co-oper 
 ated heartily; it fired his fancy and imagination and 
 many a delightful nautical talk did he build for them. 
 One is vividly remembered, "Sailing by Chart", which 
 easily carries its own scriptural lesson, but which was 
 applied with such perfect nautical terms as to call for 
 enthusiastic comment. The "chart" was the Bible 
 charting the shores; the islands, the shallows, rocks, 
 the probable derelicts, the revolving lights of "Watch 
 and Pray", the bell buoys of "Duty" and "Service", 
 and his closing words were: 
 
 So glad that we belong to the Navy of the Lord. So glad 
 that the good ship "Temple Bible School" has the best captain 
 that ever walked the quarter deck good bluff and tough, 
 rough and ready old Commodore Woodruff God bless his tarry 
 top lights. I hope so long as this is a Bible School it will never 
 drop the nautical figure he invented for us. And what other 
 272 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 school has such a naval constructor, such a Yankee ship-builder 
 as "our own Leslie McClure"? our own " Chips"? He s equal 
 to any thing that can float, from a life raft to a battleship. Such 
 a ship and such a crew; always willing; always loyal; always 
 obedient and prompt, for everything at sea goes on the run 
 and jump the safety of the ship often depends upon punc 
 tuality and promptness, especially when we re tacking ship off 
 shore in a dangerous place, with teacher and every boy and 
 girl sailor at their stations, when the order "full and by" 
 changes to "full for stays", and 
 
 The ship bends lower before the breeze 
 As her broadside fair to the blast she lays, 
 
 And she swifter springs to the rising seas, 
 As the pilot calls, " Stand by for stays ". 
 
 The Elementary Department was his special delight. 
 "The Babies " were very near his heart and often he 
 was heard to say, "Whoever has to be neglected by the 
 Pastor, the Babies must never be"; and every Sunday 
 morning the hour for leaving his home in Pasadena was 
 jealously guarded, that he might not be too late to see 
 "the blessed babies" before they were dismissed. He 
 always had a little message for them to which they gave 
 a welcoming wave of their little hands or sang him a 
 good morning song that brought tears to his eyes and 
 sunshine to his heart. One of the tenderest poems he 
 ever penned begins and ends: 
 
 Dear little Buds in the Garden of God, 
 Tenderly growing by night and by day; 
 
 Jesus of Bethlehem! Keep them thine own, 
 Sweet as Thy childhood in Nazareth town. 
 
 All young life was precious to this man whose heart 
 continued to "beat forever like a boy s" and who knew 
 so well how to "keep the dew of youth" and the opti- 
 
 18 273 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 mism of childhood. In his talks, in his secular writings, 
 and in his sermons he pleaded with parents for the 
 religious training of their children. 
 
 Develop the religious habit in your children. Bring them 
 to church. Where are your children this morning? What are 
 they doing? Anything better than they would be doing here? 
 Are they better occupied than they would be sitting here in 
 the house of God Sunday morning, forming, unconsciously to 
 themselves, a habit of church-going? Wouldn t that be better 
 than for them to be, just as unconsciously, forming the habit 
 of not going to church? They should expect to go to church 
 just as regularly every Sunday morning as they do to go to 
 school five mornings in the week. 
 
 You say, " Well, they can t understand the sermon". Well, 
 your pastor isn t likely to preach to children when there are no 
 children to preach to. You fill the empty pews with your little 
 ones, and they will understand him. I could understand ser 
 mons that were preached to grown people long, long before I 
 got over crying because I couldn t understand fractions. But 
 my parents didn t tell me I needn t go to school because I 
 couldn t understand the lessons. For that matter, I don t 
 understand fractions yet. I am glad there is no examination 
 in complex fractions and cube root at the gate of heaven. I d 
 never get in. 
 
 The value of this training in his own life was por 
 trayed when in 1909 he was asked for an "Apprecia 
 tion" for a little booklet, "In Remembrance", on the 
 passing of Dr. Henry Griggs Weston, the beloved 
 president for forty years of Crozier Theological 
 Seminary. 
 
 Doctor Weston was my pastor when I was a boy eight 
 years old. For seven years, in the First Baptist Church, of 
 Peoria, 111., my grandfather and my father were his deacons 
 during that blessed pastorate. For more than half a century 
 the judgments of the increasing years have blended with yester 
 day s memories; and the man s estimation is the boy s impres- 
 274 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 sion, deepened and heightened, but never revised. I sat at his 
 feet, then, looking up to him in loving reverence; my attitude 
 never changed, though my hair turned gray as his grew white. 
 "For the love of Christ constraineth me" is the dearest 
 of the texts I remember, and I recall so clearly the passages of 
 truth and beauty in the sermon. I was a boy listening to a 
 scholar. But as I listened I could understand. His sermons 
 were for all his congregation. The old men leaned forward to 
 hear every word. The children, with brightening eyes, looked 
 up eagerly at the passages intended especially for them, and 
 which were always kindly with the beautiful smile that made 
 them tender as caresses. And his voice, strong, magnetic, 
 gentle, persuasive that alone would have kept him forever 
 young to me. 
 
 So strong and yet tender was Mr. Burdette s hold 
 on the Sunday School, there was instituted after his 
 resignation as Pastor, a Burdette service which is held 
 on the Sunday nearest the date of his birthday, July 
 30th, and in which a specially prepared program, with 
 an appropriate stage setting, is presented during the 
 regular Sunday School hour. His last public appear 
 ance was on this occasion in 1914, when in conscious 
 weakness he gave them as their Admiral his parting 
 message, looking down into their hearts and faces with 
 a love most tender, and, seemingly through them, out 
 beyond, straining the fading sight to catch even then 
 the first glimpses of Beulah Land. 
 
 This birthday service is continued to this day and 
 his messages and spirit still abide with the young life 
 of the church he loved so dearly. 
 
 That his last typewritten effort should have been a 
 letter to Mr. T. T. Woodruff, Superintendent of the 
 Sunday School, was as he would have wished it. The 
 Superintendent, whom he always addressed as " Com 
 modore", had sent him a "Log Book" of the Sunday 
 School exercises, to which he replied October 8, 1914, 
 
 275 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 five weeks before he sailed out into the haven of eternal 
 peace: 
 
 I have read the Log Book a dozen times, and my heart has 
 O.K d. it every time. For I have laid my heart on its dear 
 pages as I recalled the sweet surprise of that day the blessed 
 ship in gala dress, the happy crew in "liberty clothes ", the 
 Admiral astonished out of speech, which was itself a marvellous 
 thing, and the Commodore on the bridge the best and blessed- 
 est Commodore that ever commanded the best and dearest 
 Gospel Ship ever launched I could see it all as plainly as 
 though I had been there. 
 
 What a genius you are! What a ship you have made of it! 
 What a clear, unmistakable call God sent you for the ministry 
 he prepared for you! I am so glad for the "sea of glass before 
 the throne, like unto crystal". I sometimes wonder if the dear 
 Lord thought of you when he prepared that feature of the 
 celestial landscape. The "river of life" is all right, of course, 
 and would be all-sufficient for the most of us. But, dear me 
 you couldn t navigate a full rigged ship on a river! 
 
 How happy have been my years of service with you, afloat 
 and ashore, my clumsy fingers cannot tell you. I think them 
 over so many times in the night-times when I cannot sleep; 
 I begin back in the early days when it was such a little ship, 
 when you mustered the normal class at a time when it was 
 hardly big enough for the smallest watch on the ship, up to these 
 glad, proud, happy days when it can officer every detail on the 
 ship. They have been happy years, haven t they? 
 
 Dear Boy I do thank God for blessing these closing years 
 of life and service with such a friend as you so dear, so loyal, 
 so true I ll think of you when I get to Heaven. 
 
 Always lovingly your Pastor, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 If Mr. Burdette had a " specialty " as Pastor, it was 
 in the conduct of the prayer-meetings, which he termed 
 the "home-gatherings". He sensed that it could be 
 made the opportunity for the "heart-to-heart life" 
 that mellows the ground for the sowing time. So happy 
 
 276 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 was he in his methods of leading all kinds of people to 
 overflow the prayer-meeting room each feeling at 
 liberty to bring to it his individual contribution of 
 word or smile or prayer, song or testimony, and each 
 taking away his own individual blessing that denom 
 inational papers and pastors requested him to publish, 
 in pamphlet form, "Prayer-meeting Topics, Sugges 
 tions and Methods", to which he made reply: 
 
 I am the happy Pastor of a "prayer-meeting" Church. 
 Temple Church was organized with a prayer-meeting, and from 
 that day to this, the happiest, brightest, hopefulest, 
 meetings of the Church have been the prayer-meetings. The 
 attendance has frequently been limited only by the size of the 
 room. More than thirty per cent of the membership roll, the 
 working, praying, giving, "planning-and-doing" force of the 
 Church is there, and "there" for some purpose. 
 
 The members sometimes tell the Pastor what they like to 
 talk or pray or sing about at their meetings and so suggest the 
 prayer-meeting topic. Consequently we do not make slavish 
 use of any list of prepared topics for the year. No group of 
 men, however wise and consecrated, can provide timely spirit 
 ual food for the daily needs of a church, two or three thousand 
 miles and twelve months away. Temple Church, in common 
 with many millions of American people, just now is just a 
 little bit shy about using "canned goods". We think the 
 date of canning should be plainly printed on the labels. 
 
 We have always spoken of the prayer-meetings as the 
 "Home Gatherings". It is the home meeting of the church. 
 It is the "upper room" where the disciples meet with the 
 Master. No preaching is permitted in the prayer-meeting. 
 On Sunday the Preacher has everything his own way; he 
 preaches what he will and as he will, and the people have to 
 listen without protest or interruption but the prayer-meeting 
 that belongs to the Church. There the Pastor is just as 
 lovingly welcome as any other member of the Church, but 
 there the Preacher has no place. The oft-used expression, 
 "Whatever is on your heart, brethren," is literally responded 
 to here. Sometimes it is an incident of the day in business or 
 
 277 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 shop or home sometimes it is a letter from an absent member, 
 for this habit of writing to "the family " by those temporarily 
 away has been much encouraged by the Pastor when absent 
 on his own vacations sometimes the singing of a solo that 
 gives expression to the soul as only song can do. 
 
 Sometimes they talk of "Mother and her Hymns", some 
 times of "Father and his Bible chapters", "Pastors I have 
 loved", "What if women kept silent in the Church", "The 
 Best Book in the Best Case", "The Fourth Man in the Fur 
 nace", as well as the more familiar topics. Not only is the 
 spiritual life quickened, but as strangers invariably remark, 
 there is a warmth and cordiality that makes them want to 
 come again. And they come again and soon become "of us". 
 
 This prayer-meeting habit is carried into the business meet 
 ings. Once in three months comes the regular quarterly busi 
 ness meeting of the church. The attendance is perhaps a little 
 larger than at our regular prayer-meetings men, women, and 
 our "blessed young people" attending in the usual proportions. 
 There is a hymn, a portion of scripture, a prayer, and then "the 
 business of the King s House". 
 
 Through all the business runs a deep, clear current of spirit 
 uality. Occasionally someone will break out with an appro 
 priate hymn at the close of a report. When the meeting is 
 closed with prayer there is the feeling that we have had another 
 good "prayer-meeting". The church has been lifted up, 
 strengthened, helped. And this is one great reason it is 
 "the" reason, why the records of our business meetings are 
 illuminated with the repetition of "Carried unanimously". 
 The spirit of harmony born in the prayer-meeting makes it 
 easy and natural for the people to "keep the unity of the 
 Spirit in the bond of peace" in business deliberations. 
 
 He sometimes called the prayer-meeting the engine- 
 room of the church and an extract is given from one of 
 his sermons not only elaborating this analogy, but 
 because it illustrates his correctness in figures of speech 
 and use of terms foreign to his real subject and his 
 beauty of expression concerning common things and 
 his picturesqueness of expression: 
 278 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 On this pleasant Sabbath morning, chafing at the great 
 cables, swinging slowly with the turning tide, rocking with the 
 swells that roll in from the restless Atlantic, the greatest fleet 
 that ever assembled under the Stars and Stripes is awaiting for 
 a word from the President of the United States, which will 
 come tomorrow; waiting for a signal that will break out from 
 the masthead of the flagship in an eloquent flame of color, 
 speaking the picturesque language of sailors. 
 
 Answering signals will flash out from every battleship, 
 cruiser and torpedo boat. Cannon from casemate and barbette 
 of the fort will thunder " Godspeed ", and rapid-fire guns will 
 answer "Good-by". Cheers from the multitudes on the shore; 
 cheers from the sailors and bluejackets on the ships will voice 
 the pride of a mighty nation. The fighting greyhounds of the 
 sea will strain at their leashes, eager for the start on the long, 
 long race through sun and calm, and night and storm. Well, 
 the thundering guns, the shrill screaming of whistles, the cheers 
 of the crowds, the fluttering signal flags won t start them. 
 
 Down out of sight of all the happy throngs and the gay 
 bunting; away from the thrill and the excitement and the gala- 
 day rainbow of color; down below the water line; down in the 
 throbbing heart of each ship, " among the purring dynamos" 
 where day and night are alike all the year round; down in each 
 engine-room a man will open a great valve. And when he, 
 out of sight and out of thought of the cheering multitude, has 
 done this, the pent-up steam, screaming its impatience from 
 every tiny vent, will fill the lungs of the ship. The power will 
 be on, and then the ships will move. 
 
 Still deeper down are the bravest fighters on the ship the 
 stokers working before the hot, devouring mouths of the roaring 
 furnaces, with never a shout to cheer and nothing to inspire 
 them only duty, white-robed and spotless as an angel of God, 
 standing in the black grime of the stoke hole, and smiling 
 gloriously into the faces of the men at their fiery posts. 
 
 The power of the ship of the church it s not on the decks; 
 it s down in the engine-room; it s behind the closed doors of 
 the inner chamber; it s in the prayer-meeting room. And in 
 Baptist churches the engine-room is down below the water line. 
 What power and love and mystery of grace and might throb in 
 the engine-room! It is pleasant and joyous here on Sunday. 
 
 279 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 To me, there is religion and there is worship in the beauty of 
 the room itself. I love the grace and the artistic science in 
 the sweep of the galleries; in the loftiness of the dome, the 
 lines of the room, the soft, pleasant color scheme that rests 
 the eyes; the cathedral setting of the choir. My heart keeps 
 time to the music of the organ, and throbs in sympathy, and 
 feels the worshipful uplift of the great voice of praise when the 
 congregation sings. I have never worshiped in a church that 
 more tenderly awakened my religious nature. It is a beautiful 
 place to come to on Sunday. 
 
 But all this is the deck of the ship. It s useful, nay, it s 
 indispensable. It s a battleship one of the biggest in the 
 fleet. Away up there, see our fighting tops with Leonard 
 Merrill in command. Here are the conning towers, whence 
 Mr. Fowler and his ushers look out over all the decks. Here 
 sits the bandmaster and here is the band. 
 
 All over the ship, every man at his post, are the sailors 
 the fighters of the ship, true-blue every one of them deep- 
 water Baptists. The Bible is our compass; the pulpit is the 
 figurehead, and the preacher is the admiral. It s all in the plan 
 of the ship. And when it is decked out in Sunday trim it all 
 looks beautiful and good. 
 
 And it is good, and it is useful; but this Sunday service, 
 with all its grace and beauty of form and color and music, isn t 
 what makes the ship go. Ah, my children, the engine-room is 
 the prayer-meeting. It s at the family altar; it s in your daily 
 Bible reading; it s in your daily prayers; it s in your commun 
 ion with God. Stop the prayer-meeting for two weeks, and 
 these great congregations would begin to fall off. Stop it for 
 a month, and the church members would begin to quit coming 
 to church. 
 
 "The gift of prayer" was one of Mr. Burdette s 
 richest blessings. He was able utterly to forget self, 
 except for common human frailties and pleading 
 necessities, and seemingly to ignore the public 
 environment when taking to God the petition of the 
 people. He prayed with such an exact understanding 
 of all they would have him ask for and with such an 
 280 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 intimate heart relation with the Loving Father that 
 each one, hearing the prayer, felt sure it was made for 
 them individually and would be answered to them. 
 
 He preferred always to offer prayer himself before 
 his sermon. Thus he "whetted his own scythe". His 
 usual form was an ascription of praise, thanksgiving 
 for blessings received and confession. Then supplica 
 tions were offered with such great tenderness, rever 
 ence and earnestness that the congregation was uncon 
 sciously led into prayer for itself. As one pastor wrote 
 of Mr. Burdette, in reference to a service in his pulpit: 
 
 Prayers were offered for the workingmen, the weary housewife 
 the merchant, the children who had great little burdens, the 
 faithful nurse with her long vigil by the sick-bed of our loved 
 ones it was an appeal that the day might help all to come 
 under the shadow of the Father s care and love. The prayer 
 was so helpful, uplifting and inspiring that it would need quite 
 a dull sermon to bring the spirit down from the heights of 
 devotion to which it had risen. 
 
 Many a person has told me they could go to church service 
 and be satisfied if they listened only to the prayer. The 
 simplicity, the directness, the perfect faith of the utterance 
 carried comfort, assurance and power. 
 
 A brief petition, found on a scrap of paper in his 
 desk, is here quoted: 
 
 Often as we would ask Thee for new blessing, our thankful 
 ness for the mercies received crowd into our hearts and set 
 aside the new petitions. For Thou dost remember our wants 
 before we can speak them; Thou knowest our needs before we 
 can tell them. Thou dost bring for us water in the wilderness 
 and fruits in the desert, Thou givest honey out of the rock and 
 rainest manna from the heavens. Thou art our Heavenly 
 Father and we thank Thee for our daily food, which faileth not. 
 
 An offertory prayer often asked for, could be repro 
 duced in his own handwriting: 
 
 God of all bounty All things are Thine, and of Thine own 
 
 281 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 free gifts to us, we have brought our offerings to the altar of Thy 
 righteousness. Now bless Thou abundantly the offerings of 
 the rich, who have given much. Bless yet more abundantly 
 the offerings of the poor, who out of their poverty have given 
 yet more. And oh, will Thou bless most lovingly and abund 
 antly of all, the gifts of the very poor, who in their penury 
 have brought Thee all they have their love and their prayers, 
 For Jesus sake. 
 
 Mr. Burdette may have been thought by church 
 people as a "prayer-meeting specialist", but he him 
 self specialized in getting away from the stereotyped 
 forms of the church that were only forms. He con 
 sidered them "man-made" and therefore, he had as 
 good a right to make his own as they had to make them 
 for him. In the pulpit and out of the pulpit his saving 
 sense of the dramatic, his delicate appreciation of what 
 was reverent and what was really irreverent, enabled 
 him to "hew close to the line" without shocking or 
 losing the essence of reverence. 
 
 The responsive readings of each church service were 
 never a formal chapter, but selected passages of scrip 
 ture blended together on some special topic and leading, 
 though the congregation did not often analyze why, to 
 an understanding of the topic he would develop. With 
 all his familiarity with the Bible and marvelous memory 
 of location of chapter and verse, this often occupied as 
 much time in preparation as the sermon, but it pre 
 pared the soil for the "Word" in a manner to which a 
 less industrious or painstaking pastor would not have 
 resorted. 
 
 While his imagination and nimbleness of mind 
 especially expressed itself in the titles he gave his 
 newspaper articles, lectures and talks, he never de 
 tracted from the beauty, dignity and reverence of a 
 scripture text by startling headlines or topics of his 
 282 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 sermons. He never made commonplace the "office of 
 his high calling to preach the gospel/ 
 
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 IN THE PACIFIC BAPTIST, JUNE 18, 1908. 
 
 283 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 And the same ethical psychology explained his 
 natural humor in a sermon, according to his reply to 
 London interviewers who propounded the usual ques 
 tion, "Do you consider humor out of place in the 
 pulpit?" 
 
 You might as well say the pulpit is not the place for pathos. 
 Anyway, I would rather make ten men laugh than one man cry. 
 We are not told whether there will be any laughter in Heaven, 
 but we are told there will be no crying there. 
 
 No administration that he performed for the church 
 was more impressive than the ordinance of baptism, 
 though he used a form that was particularly his own. 
 On one occasion the pastor baptized twenty-three can 
 didates, ranging in age from nine years to eighty-three, 
 so filling him with a spiritual sense of gratitude for this 
 crowning of his efforts that he seemed for the moment 
 to be "walking apart from this world". As this com 
 pany of friends, brothers and sisters, husband and wife, 
 father and grandfather stepped down into the waters 
 of the baptistry, each bearing a spray of Easter lilies, 
 and came up out of the waters still bearing this symbol 
 of purity, the Pastor, with radiant face, lifted his hands 
 in prayer and said, "Lord, we have done as Thou hast 
 directed and yet there is room". So reverentially 
 impressive was this in all its details, many were the 
 eyes wet with tears. 
 
 Mr. Burdette introduced a service entirely unique 
 in the history of the Baptist denomination, which in a 
 sense corresponded to the "christenings" of other 
 churches. This was known as "The Name Service" 
 and grew out of his deep-seated belief that children 
 should not be left to the evils of life until parents or 
 child came to the mature judgment that having sinned 
 it was time to repent. He felt that a far greater thing 
 284 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 was to keep them from the sin of the world by knowing 
 "no other way" than righteousness and beautiful 
 living. 
 
 The form used at the christening of his own little 
 granddaughter was and is used with variations for other 
 children: 
 
 Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord. 
 
 As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are the children 
 of the youth. 
 
 And Hannah brought her son unto the house of Jehovah 
 in Shiloh; and the child was young. And she said, "For this 
 child I prayed; and Jehovah hath given me my petition which 
 I asked of Him; therefore also I have granted him to Jehovah; 
 as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord." 
 
 And when the days of their purification according to the 
 law of Moses were fulfilled, they brought the child Jesus up to 
 Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord, and to offer the sacrifice 
 according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, a pair 
 of turtle doves or two young pigeons. 
 
 And Jehovah said, " I will establish my covenant between 
 me and thee and thy children after thee in all their generations, 
 for an everlasting covenant to be a God unto thee and unto 
 thy children". 
 
 Then there were brought unto Jesus little children that 
 he should lay his hands on them and pray; and the disciples 
 rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was moved with 
 indignation, and said unto them, "Suffer the little children to 
 come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom 
 of God. Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive 
 the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in no wise enter 
 therein." 
 
 And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying 
 his hands upon them. 
 
 The minister: "Do you, father and mother, accept for 
 yourselves and for this little one, the covenant of God, desiring 
 earnestly that its blessings may rest upon your little child? 
 And in this prayer do you lovingly and willingly consecrate 
 your little one to God the Father?" 
 
 285 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 The parents: "We do." 
 
 To the god-father: " Do you, called to be god-father to the 
 little one, promise to be to her a true friend, a faithful counsellor 
 and a loving protector, through all her years of childhood and 
 youth?" 
 
 The god-father: "I do." 
 
 To the parents: "What name have you given this child?" 
 
 The parents: " Clara Bradley." 
 
 Our dear Heavenly Father, and Thou, Oh Jesus of Bethle 
 hem, lover and saviour of little children, into Thy keeping of 
 love and truth and wisdom we commend this dear and blessed 
 little one. We lay her in Thy arms for Thy blessing and favor, 
 for the blessing which Thou didst whisper above the little ones 
 in Jerusalem. Lead her in all the increasing years, in paths of 
 righteous, in safe and pleasant ways of peace. Keep the 
 precious soul from sin and evil of the world. With coming 
 years of knowledge and discretion, bring her into the fellowship 
 of the church of God, confessing Christ and following Him in 
 the waters of the baptism of regeneration. Be Thou her 
 Heavenly Father, Lord our God, be Thou her loving Elder 
 Brother, Jesus our Saviour, and bring her at last with ever 
 lasting joy into the glory of her eternal home. 
 
 Many expressions in the usual marriage ceremony 
 did not appeal to him. He created a form of ceremony 
 that all brides "just loved" and assembled friends 
 approved and admired, in which he gave play to his 
 purest imagination and tenderest expressions. He 
 omitted from the usual ceremony the expression "in 
 sickness and in health", saying to "love her, comfort 
 her, honor and keep her" covered the conditions with 
 out cumbering the promise. He never asked the bride 
 to promise to "obey him and serve him", that being 
 obsolete. Nor did he require the man to say "with all 
 my worldly goods I thee endow", because he felt that 
 did not matter if he endowed her with the higher and 
 finer things of his manly life that would follow. "As 
 
 286 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 Isaac and Rebekah lived faithfully together", he also 
 omitted, as he interpreted the biblical history, to record 
 the fact that "she was not a faithful wife, but a lying, 
 nagging woman ". The ceremony used at the marriage 
 of his own step-son is treasured by more than the im 
 mediate interested parties and shows with what wealth 
 of expression he adorned this sacred sacrament. 
 
 The long years on the lecture platform and the large 
 contact with the newspaper public had tethered to 
 Mr. Burdette, by cords that time and place left un 
 broken, large groups of people, not only from every 
 State in the Union, but wherever English-speaking 
 people lived throughout the world. This drew a very 
 cosmopolitan congregation and church membership. 
 His remarkable memory and surprising versatility were 
 the marvel of all those who heard him, as he passed 
 down a long line of new members extending the right 
 hand of fellowship with a personal word of welcome to 
 each, adapted only to that individual. 
 
 Among his papers is a sheet on which he had 
 written: 
 
 Right Hand of Fellowship. 
 
 Welcome to Service. 
 
 Comfort. (One who has sorrowed.) 
 
 Joy of Conflict. (One with peculiar temptations.) 
 
 Messenger, swift-footed. (Young man.) 
 
 Service of singing. (Woman member of Choir.) 
 
 Head of the House; its Priest indeed. (Father.) 
 
 Joy. 
 
 A Three-fold cord. (One of a family of three.) 
 
 Service of Counsel. (Professional man.) 
 
 Welcome to the green pastures of refreshing grace. 
 
 (A sweet-faced old lady.) 
 Rest that follows toil. (Old Man.) 
 The strength and glory of the Promises. 
 
 287 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 and twenty-four others which were evidently outlined 
 for a morning when thirty-five new members were taken 
 into the church. 
 
 This cosmopolitan congregation was also due to 
 two other facts which Mr. Burdette inspired, that of 
 the down-town church and his catholicity of invitation. 
 When Temple Church was first organized he issued the 
 following invitation in card form and had it widely 
 distributed: 
 
 THE TEMPLE BAPTIST CHURCH 
 
 Who are Invited? 
 Who are Wanted? 
 
 all of the following: 
 
 RAILROAD MEN. Presidents, superintendents, managers, 
 clerks, engineers, conductors, motormen, car cleaners, repairers, 
 electricians, and the men that use the shovel and the pick. 
 
 NEWSPAPER MEN. Publishers, editors, managers, solici 
 tors, compositors, pressmen, stereotypers, mailers, bookkeepers, 
 office boys and newsboys. 
 
 MERCHANTS. Proprietors, clerks, bookkeepers, stenog 
 raphers, salesmen, saleswomen, cash and bundle boys. 
 
 CAPITALISTS. The banker, real estate men, all mining 
 men. 
 
 THE JUDGE, attorneys and clerks. 
 
 THE ARCHITECT. Contractors, carpenters, brick masons, 
 apprentices, painters, plumbers, gas fitters. 
 
 THE RESTAURANTERS, the waiter, the chef, the bell boy, 
 the porter, the housekeeper, the matron, messenger, the hair 
 dresser, bootblacks, bakers, the laundress, the hostler, the 
 upholsterer. 
 
 SALOON PROPRIETORS are most cordially invited. Please 
 come and bring your customers. 
 
 STUDENTS AND SCHOLARS. Young and old, rich and poor, 
 one and all. 
 
 "The rich and the poor meet together, 
 and the Lord is the Maker of them all." 
 
 Prov. 22:2. 
 288 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 To the Stranger and the Visitor, and especially to the men 
 and women of that world-wide confraternity that amuses, and 
 teaches, and encourages from stage and rostrum, whose restless 
 year knows three hundred stopping places and no home "A 
 Hundred Thousand Welcomes!" Make the Temple your 
 Church Home while you sojourn in Los Angeles. 
 
 This was signed by the replica of his own signature, 
 thus giving it a more personal touch. It was the art of 
 this personal appeal in everything he did which was 
 part of his power. 
 
 In no way did he give greater emphasis to this 
 personal touch than in the preparation of the Temple- 
 Herald, the weekly calendar that awaited the great 
 congregation each Sabbath and which imparted one 
 of the most important and helpful silent services to 
 those who read with their soul as well as their eyes. 
 He knew so well the appeal of the artistic and dra 
 matic touch, as well as the detailed recognition of per 
 sonal groups outside of the church. 
 
 The calendar for one Decoration Day carried two 
 items of information: 
 
 The sword upon the pulpit was carried at the battle of 
 Bunker Hill one hundred and thirty years ago. It is a genuine 
 Toledo blade. 
 
 The members of the City police force who are with us today 
 are representatives of the armies of the Union, the Confederacy, 
 the Spanish-American war, and of the war in the Philippines. 
 
 He gave as much time and thought to the prepara 
 tion of the Herald as to the writing of the sermons and 
 the acknowledgment of its value was found in the fact 
 that it had regular paid subscriptions from people in 
 the east, this fund going to the work of the church. 
 His habit was to choose a text and a sermon topic; 
 then to carefully select a cut for the front page which 
 19 289 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 should illustrate the topic of the sermon, and then 
 write a poem to give expression to the cut. 
 
 This last was undertaken in response to my sugges 
 tion. He asked me once what I wanted for Christmas 
 and I replied "a poem each week for the calendar", 
 knowing through the years how much of helpfulness, 
 tenderness and poetic expression could flow from his 
 pen when affection and sentiment moved upon his 
 spirit. These poems were afterward gathered into a 
 book entitled, "Silver Trumpets". 
 
 His dedication of the little volume indicates the 
 spirit of the lines that follow: 
 
 And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying, Make thee two 
 trumpets of silver; of beaten work shalt thou make them; and 
 thou shalt use them for the calling of the congregation, and for 
 the journeying of the camps. And when they shall blow them, 
 all the congregation shall gather themselves unto thee at the 
 door of the tent of the meeting. 
 
 The echoes of the Silver Trumpets are very dear to the 
 Pastor who sounded the calls in the years from 1903 to 1909, 
 for they are the voices of the worshippers who sang the songs of 
 Zion in the Tent of the Meeting, and chanted the marching 
 music of the Church along the way of Pilgrimage. And he 
 hopes they may once more sound pleasantly to the past and 
 the present mighty Congregations of the Temple, which on the 
 recurring Sabbath days still throng the House beyond its doors, 
 even while their uncounted numbers are scattered in long 
 skirmish lines and serried columns from the Sunrise to the 
 Sunset. 
 
 He likewise carefully selected the pictures in his 
 study and changed them from time to time, that they 
 might preach a sermon to all who entered there. 
 
 And a later article, "The Pew as Seen from the 
 Pulpit", is a rich commentary on the manners of a 
 congregation, "played up" in his choicest style. 
 290 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 Speaking of mannerisms, Mr. Burdette was heard 
 repeatedly to say: 
 
 I have never understood why the dear Lord thought I 
 ought to make my way through life, making a living and doing 
 my work, standing before the public, talking, when I hadn t 
 the first qualification for it. I am just a little bent-legged 
 fellow with no voice or presence, little hair and few teeth. 
 
 He failed to acknowledge that personality is 
 supreme, that the merry heart of him drew all men, 
 that his understanding of the human heart in all its 
 joys and sorrows was the key that unlocked the heart 
 of the world to him, that his never-failing faith in man 
 kind and God gave him more than mere human power. 
 And men loved him. Women loved him, too, for 
 women are given to a genuine affection for their pastor, 
 as well as a sentimental adoration of the "dear pastor". 
 But he was a man s man and they expressed an affection 
 for him that was unusual as between men. Men liked 
 his simple, straightforward preaching, for he always 
 felt that it was not a theological thesis, nor a literary 
 production they wanted, but the simple story of the 
 gospel, and as best evidence of the truth of this was a 
 count made of rows of the congregation taken Sunday 
 after Sunday, morning and evening, and 51 per cent 
 plus of men in attendance. 
 
 An editor in an Eastern paper commenting upon 
 Mr. Burdette s pastorate and the frequent question, 
 "Why do not more men go to church?" said: 
 
 In an overwhelming percentage of cases the environment 
 of an education for the ministry unfits a man for the calling for 
 which he believes himself to be preparing. It is different with 
 the Rev. Burdette. He spent more than twenty years in the 
 roil and ruction of newspaper offices, learning to know humanity 
 
 291 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 not as it ought to be, or as it would like to be, or as the church 
 men would like to believe it, but as it is. Better yet, most of 
 that period was lived in the lesser towns, where the editor 
 suffers even less from the aloofness that is the bane of the priest 
 hood than does his contemporary in a large city. 
 
 He spent other years on the road, lecturing and meeting 
 and mingling with all sorts and conditions of man and woman 
 kind. He knows us; he can talk to us; he can understand us 
 and we can understand him. He speaks the language of our 
 tribe, and neither his mental processes nor his spiritual emotions 
 are too rarefied to appeal to us. The wit and wisdom, the ready 
 sympathy and fine humanity that delighted and improved us 
 in his humorous writing and in his lay addresses can not fail 
 to shine through his pulpit efforts. It ought to be worth while 
 to sit under his preaching. Even to read his sermons would 
 be a privilege. 
 
 It is a tribute to Mr. Burdette s breadth of spirit 
 that as a preacher, thinker, brother of men, he treasured 
 the memory of a friendship begun with Robert J. Inger- 
 soll during his boyhood. Both were of the type of 
 master-mind, though the one was mature when the 
 other was beginning his career. When Mr. Ingersoll 
 died, Mr. Burdette, then pastor of the Pasadena Pres 
 byterian Church, had no hesitancy in paying a tribute 
 to Mr. Ingersoll from that pulpit: 
 
 When, but a short day or two ago Robert G. Ingersoll 
 passed beyond the confines of this life into the world that sets 
 this one right, there stepped from the stage of earthly activities 
 the most brilliantly eloquent orator of his nation. God give 
 him peace. . . . 
 
 I was a boy of fourteen when first I knew this brilliant man, 
 as a schoolboy might know a young lawyer, eleven years his 
 senior. As I grew to manhood, our lives came closer together; 
 I was a writer on a newspaper, he a powerful and prominent 
 politician of the same party. Those of us who knew him best 
 remember him now most tenderly, with all gentleness in our 
 
 292 
 
CALIFORNIA PERMANENT CHURCH WORK 
 
 sorrow. The head of gold, the heart of silver alas, the feet 
 of human clay we knew so well. 
 
 We knew the generous heart, the open hand, the loving 
 nature. When my early ambitions began to ripen into purposes, 
 I talked with him about them. How manly, how honest, how 
 helpful were his suggestions and counsel, so gladly and freely 
 given a client waiting in the ante-room while this great lawyer 
 advised and encouraged an ambitious boy on the threshold of 
 journalism. 
 
 They clung to him lovingly, the Christian people of Peoria 
 who were his friends. In more than one Christian family have 
 I heard the prayers at the family altar go up to the throne of 
 grace for him, that he might give to God the noblest uses of 
 the splendid powers God had given him. The man s life in 
 his old home was circled by prayers. 
 
 The great sorrow of it all is that he should have preached 
 unbelief, distrust; that he should have torn down a sweet hope, 
 a beautiful faith, when he had nothing to give in its place. 
 That he should have taught doubt. Here and there, perhaps, 
 he shook some strong faith in a stalwart Christian; here and 
 again, it may be, he quenched, or seemed to utterly quench, 
 the light of faith in some " little one" of Christ s whose wavering 
 faith was already weak. God pity us all! Is your life, is mine, 
 always a gospel of faith and trust and joyous hope? Have we 
 never by word or act, by faulty life, by inconsistent walk 
 awakened in some questioning soul new and multiplied doubts? 
 
 He has gone beyond the reach of our judgment, beyond 
 the weight of our censure, the sweetness of our praise. He 
 stands where, soon or late, in a few days or in many years, 
 you and I must stand. And where we must stand to be judged, 
 just as he is judged at the bar of God, not the tribunal of men. 
 Some good there was he did ; some evil. When we stand where 
 he now stands, when the All-seeing eye looks upon the naked 
 soul, yours and mine, will God see no stain of evil in our lives? 
 "If thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, Lord, who shall 
 stand?" 
 
 His tolerance was voiced in a poem he wrote con 
 cerning the various mental attitudes people took toward 
 prayer, the last stanza reading: 
 
 293 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Father give each his answer, 
 
 Each in his kindred way: 
 Adapt Thy light to his form of night 
 
 And grant him his needed day. 
 
 His summing up of the worth-whileness of preaching 
 the gospel was set down in his reply to a preacher friend 
 who had been somewhat discouraged and who asked 
 his advice about returning to literature: 
 
 Don t you be in a hurry to abandon the greatest, highest, 
 noblest calling on earth for anything else. "Literature" is 
 dust under the feet of the gospel. 
 
 294 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 THIS permanent church work, while it would 
 have required all the energies of a less resource 
 ful and physically strong man, did not by any 
 means absorb all his energies, for his fame as a 
 public speaker, and his ready response, was to make 
 constant and innumerable demands upon him for his 
 part in civic life. 
 
 Possibly it was well that he had this call from the 
 more current events to spare him what was a great 
 strain upon him in the purely church line of service, 
 because of his keen sympathy. He was so well known 
 by strangers in the community, he was so loved by those 
 who had felt his sympathy that there was a large dis 
 proportionate demand upon him for the services of the 
 dead, and while he rendered them freely and lovingly, 
 they drew greatly upon him, and I often felt that had 
 it not been for the reaction that he found in this very 
 civic life, the seriousness of the other service would have 
 robbed him earlier of his humor and in some sense of 
 his buoyant spirit. 
 
 To undertake to enumerate and classify the demands 
 made upon him would be an impossible task, but they 
 were so varied that they became interesting, interesting 
 because of the various types of people who felt they had 
 equal claim upon him. 
 
 His was a justifiable pride in that his popularity as a 
 lecturer withstood distance, the years, and changing 
 attitude of the public mind toward this form of enter 
 tainment. "The Redpath Lyceum Bureau, under date 
 
 295 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 of April 25, 1907, over thirty years after the date of 
 Mr. Burdette s first lecture, wrote: 
 
 The matter which is agitating my mind at present is whether 
 or not you would care to accept lecture engagements. If you 
 could see your way clear to accept an engagement of six to 
 ten weeks, with six lectures per week, I would most certainly 
 be delighted to entertain a proposition from you on this basis. 
 I can further testify and solemnly promise to pledge and other 
 wise assure you that the jump will not be over an average of 
 one hundred to one hundred and fifty miles per day and that 
 there will be no necessity of cross-country drives in a blizzard 
 with the mercury twenty degrees below zero, as in the olden days. 
 
 As these lectures paid $100 each, the six weeks 
 engagement meant $3600 and the ten weeks engage 
 ment, $6000, a very good earning capacity for one 
 passing the sixty-third birthday. 
 
 Of course he could only accept such lecture engage 
 ments as would permit him to return to his Sunday 
 service and not interrupt church work, but he was in 
 constant demand for banquets, being a famous toast- 
 master, for addresses of every kind and description, 
 including educational, political, municipal, social and, 
 of course, all phases of church work. 
 
 In the course of his long lecture career he received 
 every form of introduction, from the sublime to the 
 ridiculous, and many were the smiles he had over the 
 unconscious humor of the men who tried to introduce 
 the humorist in a humorous way, but one of the most 
 beautiful and treasured introductions he ever received 
 was that given in these later years by President James 
 A. B. Scherer of Throop College of Technology, on the 
 occasion of his lecture in Pasadena on "Rainbow 
 Chasers ", when Dr. Scherer said: 
 
 God gave him wit. Shining, and clean and keen, his shafts 
 shoot swift at shams, follies and falsehoods. For these he 
 296 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 keeps his quiver full of sharp and stinging arrows; his shining 
 wit. 
 
 God gave him humor. His Jovian mirth compels the fat 
 round earth to cosmic glee seismic shocks that shake the terra 
 firma from Watts to Burmah, in the camaraderie of blithe 
 hilarity. 
 
 God gave him fancy; his hawkeye pierces through the husk 
 to seed, through fact to truth; his eye can read beauty in com 
 monplace places, and his pen becomes a brush. 
 
 God gave him grace; those smiling lips are touched with 
 holy fire; he knows to teach the lowly to aspire; his words 
 have spelt to multitudes release and peace. 
 
 God gave him heart warm as the April sunshine, friendly 
 as rain, mellow as winter apples, open, and plain. 
 
 God gives him to us. We can not repay the debt that we 
 owe kindly Heaven for our own Bob Burdette. 
 
 He not only preached the Baccalaureate sermons in 
 the universities of the Coast, but gave the commence 
 ment addresses at high schools and the various educa 
 tional institutions of the State. 
 
 His cleverness as an after-dinner speaker and as a 
 toastmaster at formal and informal banquets was 
 known far and wide, and few were the functions of a 
 public character in Southern California that he was not 
 called upon to lend his share of cheer and good humor, 
 and in his addresses always there blended that bright 
 humor with the splendid philosophy of his living. He 
 was toastmaster on the occasion of the entertainment 
 of Sir Thomas Lipton at Pasadena, and it was at that 
 time that he poked a bit of fun at his neighboring city 
 of Los Angeles that has become classic in the West: 
 
 What is the use of Los Angeles annexing territory to make 
 it a seaport? All Los Angeles has to do is to run a pipe line 
 down to the ocean, and then if she will only suck as hard as 
 she blows now, she will have the whole ocean at her doorstep. 
 
 297 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Continuing, he said: 
 
 We do our guest honor in the most typical Pasadena fashion. 
 We welcome him to a banquet party at which tea is the only 
 tipple, where the toastmaster is a Baptist minister, and one of 
 the after-dinner speakers is a Lutheran missionary, the next a 
 clergyman of the Church of England, and the third a Scotch 
 Presbyterian minister. If that blend of theology doesn t 
 satisfy an Irishman, who is a British merchant, born in " Gles- 
 gie" and trained in America, we can add a dozen other ecclesi 
 astical flavors to it without weakening the brew. 
 
 The versatility and adaptability of his mind was 
 never better shown than in the introduction of the 
 speakers at this banquet: 
 
 I will fire the gun a harmless old, smooth-bore howitzer, 
 that was used all through the Civil War, to start the regatta. 
 Speaking of the war but that brings us into peril on a lee 
 shore. We must hasten to tack ship and get out into blue 
 water. We are at the starting line and the starting gun is 
 fired. It s up to you, Dr. Scherer. 
 
 Dr. Scherer began his talk by stating he had some 
 days ago received a program of the Pennsylvania 
 Society dinner given to Mr. Burdette this same evening, 
 and Mr. Burdette had been its guest in Los Angeles and 
 driven to Pasadena to act as toastmaster at this ban 
 quet. Dr. Scherer went on to say: 
 
 this program was written all over in red ink by the hand of 
 this festive toastmaster, and it read: "They may kill me yet. 
 If they do, bury me on old Orange Grove Avenue. It will be 
 sure to be torn up on or before the resurrection day." 
 
 In introducing Dr. Learned to the Lipton banquet 
 ers, Mr. Burdette said: 
 
 I have not received much education in yachting, but as a 
 boy I can remember sailing over into a neighbor s orchard and 
 back again, with spanker flying. That was in old Nantucket, 
 that was, as you know, a great whaling point in those days. 
 
 298 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 And now we are to hear from a rector of the Church of 
 England. Hard-a-lee Doctor. 
 
 At the close he delivered the "dog watch " in 
 nautical terms, with great applause. 
 
 None who had any claim from a civic or philan 
 thropic point of view to his talents as a public speaker 
 and to the wealth of his philosophy and affection, ever 
 sought him in vain. To the nurses graduating from 
 training at the Pasadena Hospital he gave some advice 
 born out of his long experiences, when he said: 
 
 It is only a child of a world, a mere baby among the planets. 
 You will humor it a little and be patient with it. Like all 
 children, it is more or less conceited. You will find that after 
 the first time it pretends to have brain fag merely to enjoy the 
 luxury of a trained nurse, and like all children, it loves a real 
 headache and thinks it is going to die in ten minutes. 
 
 You will know when to soothe and comfort it with motherly 
 cooings and you will know when to administer the other treat 
 ment. For sometimes the very best and kindest thing you can 
 do is at some opportune moment, when none of the family 
 is around, to lift it out of its warm, comfortable bed and its 
 nest of downy pillows, and set it down into the hardest bottomed 
 chair in the room with a slam that rattles the medicine glasses 
 on the little stand. Astonishment associates most advanta 
 geously with firmness as an effective remedial agent in a large 
 class of disorders which exist only in the whim of the patient. 
 
 I have been a trained nurse myself for many years. My 
 observation has been that in cases of the character above indi 
 cated, after a patient has been treated with coddle he is subject 
 to frequent relapses, coming back again and again for more, 
 until he can take thirty doses a day, and then groan himself 
 sweetly and comfortably to sleep, whereas after one heroic dose 
 of slam, the same patient gets up, puts on his every-day clothes 
 and goes back to work. 
 
 He welcomed the 66th Annual Convention of the 
 American Institute of Homeopathy, in Pasadena, by 
 saying: 
 
 299 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 A hundred thousand allopathic welcomes! Each welcome 
 in heroic doses the minutest trituration bigger than an old- 
 fashioned bolus. To be taken in the same old way eyes shut 
 and mouth open swallowing whatever we set before you, 
 believing whatever we tell you and asking no questions for your 
 conscience s sake. Most appropriately are you welcomed, for 
 this month also marks my own personal sixty-sixth annual 
 convention. I was born the year after Samuel Christian 
 Frederich Hahnemann died. How the world got along during 
 that interim year has always been a mystery to me. I was born 
 in homeopathic quantity, and in my old age I have not departed 
 therefrom. Welcome, then, from a contemporary of your own 
 school. 
 
 Of three things is sickless and sinless Pasadena proud the 
 Board of Trade, the churches and Pasadena Hospital; every 
 one of them over-crowded, and each one naturally busier than 
 the other two. There aren t enough physicians in the city to 
 look at half the tongues that are thrust out daily, and so the 
 postmaster works overtime at the stamp window. 
 
 You are as welcome to our festivities as you are to the rooms 
 haunted with pain, where imploring eyes, with the mute elo 
 quence of need, look into your faces as the lepers used to look 
 up into the face of the Healing Christ. Welcome to bowers of 
 roses and to the banquet board, and to all the fraternity of our 
 good fellowship. We will crown you with wreaths of camomile 
 and garlands of belladonna. We will decorate the gates of the 
 city and the windows of our drug stores with banners of calamus 
 sweet flag of our country! 
 
 But such an allopathic speech is out of place and practice 
 at a homeopathic banquet. As I took my text from Shakes 
 peare, I close with the words of the bard in the " Merchant of 
 Venice": 
 
 " Sirs, you are welcome to our house; It must appear in other 
 ways than words; therefore I scant this breathing welcome." 
 
 Three dollars, please. And ten cents for the phial. No 
 charge for the cork. 
 
 At the time of the reception to the Fleet in 1908, 
 he was in constant demand as the one man who could 
 express the spirit of the Coast. It was on at least six 
 
 300 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 nearly consecutive occasions that he addressed different 
 gatherings and functions in honor of the officers of the 
 Fleet, and at San Francisco on May 7th, he spoke on 
 "Battles and Banquets", and said: 
 
 A little while ago, in the land of Everything, I sat at a 
 banquet with the Atlantic Fleet for six glorious days, as many 
 joyous nights, and an equal number of thoughtful mornings. 
 There have been banquets, some of you may remember, that 
 have lasted longer than that, tasting different each successive 
 morning. I sat enthroned between the Quaker uniforms of the 
 Admirals, and the sad, nun-like garbs of the Governor s staff, 
 representing the entire gold reserve of the Treasury, listening 
 impatiently to the eloquent after-dinner speeches consuming 
 valuable time which should have been utilized by mine own. 
 
 And as I heard the landsmen, who got so seasick on the 
 launches they couldn t visit the fleet, extol the splendor and 
 the invincible armament of our peerless navy, I thought what 
 a cat-and-parrot time the Japanese fleet would have trying to 
 sail up the Los Angeles River. I laughed to think what a 
 bitter awakening would come to the misguided nation that 
 should surround the United States and try to starve us out. 
 An "durin the wah", wherein, with a most unnatural and 
 bloodthirsty ferocity entirely foreign to my native disposition, 
 I killed as many of the Confeds as they killed of me, we used 
 to say of our favorite general, that " he d rather fight than eat". 
 Gentlemen of the Blue and Gold, I have fought for my country 
 and I have eaten for her. And I declare that our fighting Gen 
 eral was right. He was a soldier, and he instinctively chose 
 the easier job. I wasn t so tired at the close of the siege of 
 Vicksburg, or the long foot-race down the Red River, as I was 
 when the festivities ended at Los Angeles. . . . 
 
 Battles and banquets are yoke fellows in the history of the 
 world. Esau sat down to dinner with his clever brother, and 
 the result of that savory banquet was enmity and hatred 
 between the house of the twin brethren for nearly 4000 years, 
 for they hate each other unto this day. They were good 
 friends as good friends as twin brothers usually are until they 
 met at dinner and talked business. 
 
 301 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 The great war of American Independence raged around a 
 cup of tea. Our fathers loved tea. But they died rather than 
 drink it. If it was English breakfast tea, I don t blame them. 
 
 The French revolution simply formed the long bread lines 
 of the Paris mobs into a line of battle. If you want to set a 
 group of friendly dogs to fighting, just throw down one bone 
 among them. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was walking down a street in Springfield 
 one morning, with two of his boys beside him, bawling lustily. 
 A neighbor heard the row and looked out. " What s the matter 
 with the boys, Mr. Lincoln?" "Oh," he replied, "just what 
 ails all the rest of the world. I have three walnuts and each of 
 them wants two." 
 
 To the graduates of Throop Polytechnic Institution 
 he gave of his best experience when he said : 
 
 You hear the question discussed in religious magazines and 
 the pulpits all over the country, "Why have the working men 
 left the church?" I will tell you. Because we have so few 
 working men in the pulpit. Here a boy is sent to kindergarten 
 when he is 4 years old, enters the primary department at 6, 
 graduates from high school at 18 or 19, gets his diploma from 
 college at 22, closes a post-graduate course at Harvard at 23. 
 A year in Europe. Then he specializes for a year, and at 25, 
 having spent 21 years of his life in the school, studying, and 
 in the class room among students, professors, investigators 
 and theorists, he steps out upon the rostrum or climbs into the 
 pulpit. 
 
 "Now, I will teach men. Now I will get at the hearts of 
 men who have moistened their brows with the sweat of toil 
 since they were 15 years old, who began their apprenticeship 
 to life when they were 6 years old. Who have earned their 
 own living ever since they could sell newspapers, polish shoes 
 and run on errands." 
 
 Then he preaches and lectures to people brought up some 
 what like himself and wonders why the working men have 
 drifted away from the church. 
 
 I tell you, learned professor, these things that have made 
 you the great teacher, the wise man, the learned scholar that 
 302 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 you are, do not open a way into the hearts of men. I tell you, 
 Jesus Christ could not so have drawn to himself the hearts of 
 the common people who heard him gladly, the thronging multi 
 tudes that followed him gladly out into the wilderness; the poor 
 and the wretched, the homeless and the penniless had not 
 clustered about him, blind men had not called to him, mothers 
 had not brought their little ones to him, lepers in defiance of 
 the law had not burst through the multitudes to cast them 
 selves at his feet, had he not been the son of a carpenter, even 
 as he was the son of God. 
 
 He was always an ardent suffragist, believing in the 
 absolute social and political equality of the sexes, and 
 his voice and pen were busy in any campaign for 
 women s suffrage or its extension. Typical of his 
 suffrage addresses is one delivered in Temple Baptist 
 Church on the subject of "Fair Play for Fair Women", 
 and the text from Philippians, "Help these women". 
 He was eloquent with his faith in the equality of woman 
 to take her place beside man in any field of righteous 
 ness or endeavor, and in a later speech delivered in the 
 heat of a suffrage campaign, he said: 
 
 Why shouldn t woman vote? Everybody else in America 
 votes. Americans, English, French, Germans, Dutch, Italians, 
 Russians, Austrians, Canadians, Mexicans, negroes, Indians, 
 half-breeds, rich men, poor men, beggar men, tramps and 
 thieves, burglars and safe-blowers, confidence men, hold-ups 
 and strong arms, men who can t read, men who can t write, 
 men who can t speak a word of English, drunkards and degen 
 erates, swindlers and pickpockets, frauds and counterfeiters, 
 pig-headed men, skillet-headed men, men with one idea, men 
 with half an idea, men who never had a ghost of an idea in all 
 their lives, and never had any place to put it if they had picked 
 one up in the street, men who have been in jail, men on their way 
 to the penitentiary, politicians, ward heelers, grafters and ballot- 
 box stuffers, bribe-givers and bribe-takers, all the men in Adams 
 County, 0., men who run dance houses and men who run gamb 
 ling houses, men who run blind pigs and road-houses, liars, 
 
 303 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 fools, knaves, all sorts and conditions of rascality the one 
 qualification in every instance being that they must be males 
 these have each an equal voice in the selection of our officers, 
 the law-makers of the great republic from President down to 
 Councilman. 
 
 Now, what s the matter with extending the franchise to the 
 woman? Isn t she good enough? You entrust a share in the 
 direction of the government of the country to all the scourings 
 of rascaldom enumerated above. These are your fellow citi 
 zens. You walk to the polls with them. Some of them a 
 great many of them, belong to your party and help to elect 
 your candidate. 
 
 Your wife sweet, and pure, and refined, and a little more 
 highly educated than yourself, it may be can t she be trusted 
 to select the best candidate and cast a vote for him? Do you 
 demand in the voter a moral qualification so high that she 
 cannot attain thereto? Isn t your wife, your sister, your 
 sweetheart, your mother, good enough to assist in the direction 
 of the affairs of this republic this State of California this 
 city of Los Angeles? 
 
 These fellows whom I have described in types and occupa 
 tions think she is too good. That s why they are going to vote 
 against woman suffrage. Every man who is afraid of the 
 entrance into our political life of a mighty influence for right 
 eousness will vote against the eighth amendment, even though 
 he has to take a man into the booth to mark his ballot for 
 him. 
 
 Doesn t she know enough? Hasn t she good sense, your 
 wife? Doesn t she know as much as the flat-head from the 
 slums of some European capital who was naturalized in a 
 wholesale bunch before he had been in New York long enough 
 to get on the police force? Doesn t she know as much as any 
 dumb-head in the mobs of voting cattle who are often herded 
 to the polls in the great cities, casting their ballots without 
 knowing for whom they are voting? Doesn t she know enough 
 to vote the ballot the man hands her? 
 
 She knows more than that. She knows enough to mark 
 her own ballot. She knows too much. That s the reason the 
 men who deal in "voting cattle" are opposed to the eighth 
 304 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 amendment. The professional politicians are her avowed 
 enemies. 
 
 Isn t she clever enough? Does she lack political intelli 
 gence? She has had little enough experience in politics in this 
 State. It is difficult to learn politics without practice. But 
 listen to this: A few weeks ago all the political camps in the 
 State were thrown into a panic by the fear that all the amend 
 ments would fail, being either badly drawn, faultily recorded, 
 incorrectly phrased, some fault of ignorance or incapacity on 
 the part of the statesmen and secretaries threatened the valid 
 ity of every one of them. 
 
 With one lone exception. 
 
 Let me read you a paragraph from the editorial columns of 
 the Los Angeles Times a journal not favorable to the cause of 
 woman suffrage, but which is fair to say, editorially, August 21, 
 that "amidst the tangled condition of the amendments which 
 cost the State of California thousands of dollars to have pre 
 sented in their muddled shape, that one lone amendment stood 
 out, clear, comprehensive, exact in text and record, and that is 
 the amendment providing for woman suffrage." 
 
 Curtsy to the Times, ladies, your prettiest and gracefullest. 
 Toss the General a rose. In the heart of him, he knows that 
 legislation would be improved in form, spirit, enactment, text, 
 transcript and record, if there were a few women to look 
 after it. 
 
 While his was the type of mind that had little com 
 prehension of commercialism as practiced especially by 
 banking institutions, it is perhaps a remarkable illustra 
 tion of his diversified adaptability that when the 
 National Bankers Association met in Los Angeles in 
 1910 he was asked to make them an address, which he 
 did on "Thrift/ so acceptably it was not only printed 
 in full in their annual record, but has been repeatedly 
 reprinted for the purpose of suggestion and entertain 
 ment: 
 
 What is thrift? I went to that great safety deposit of all 
 
 human knowledge, the Century Dictionary, for information, 
 
 20 305 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 and the dictionary said that thrift is the condition of one who 
 thrives. Well, that sounded reasonable, but it was not quite 
 good enough, so I read on further. It said: "Luck, fortune, 
 success." And then it paused there, for the audience didn t 
 look satisfied, and it said once more it said: "Frugality, 
 economical management." And still the judges looked a little 
 bit dissatisfied, and the Century Dictionary made one final and 
 a good shot at it. It said: "Good husbandry." Well, that is 
 about it. The best definition I know of is just about 
 "thrift". 
 
 It is like the boy s dogs. He had four or five, and one day 
 he showed them to a friend who came to see them. This was a 
 fox hound; this was a bull dog; this was a terrier; this was 
 another. And finally they came to the last one, who had the 
 best qualities, the keenest scent, was the best fighter and the 
 one that was able to take care of itself under all circumstances, 
 and the boy said: "This is just dog." 
 
 Now, after all, what is thrift? Just thrift. It is an old 
 English word, and, like most old words, has rustic associations. 
 The word brings to one s mental vision a clean farm, not over- 
 acred, but without a weed or a mortgage on it; a farmer who 
 has men to do his work and a farmer s wife with servants in 
 the house and leisure afternoons for herself, in spite of all which 
 the man does more work than any two of his hired men and the 
 woman does a little more than half the housework. 
 
 He takes the paper and reads it without spelling the words 
 of two syllables aloud; is a church member; a school trustee; 
 owns a little mysterious dividend-paying stock, which the neigh 
 bors always mention in the plural; loans a little money on cut 
 throat security and compounds all the overdue interest; is 
 kind-hearted and cheery spoken; forecloses a mortgage with a 
 smile and an encouraging prophecy of better times just ahead 
 for the mortgagor. Pays every obligation on the minute and 
 to the penny, takes advantage of every holiday and Sunday, 
 and always waits for the change. Waits till he gets it, too. 
 But if the odd penny in the transaction is coming your way he 
 hesitates and gazes at you with a pathetic note of inquiry in his 
 expectant eyes. If, with half an eye on that penny yourself, 
 you mumble ever so indistinctly, "Oh, that s all right!" he 
 306 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 fades out of the scenario so swiftly and completely that you 
 think you must have dreamed you saw him standing there a 
 minute ago. 
 
 Never wronged any man out of a dollar and no man ever 
 did him out of a nickel; carries his money in an old-fashioned 
 wallet, with more and tighter folds than a boa-constrictor, with 
 which he wraps up his wad very rapidly when he has received a 
 payment, and unwraps it with the deliberate motions of a man 
 working by the day when he is getting out money to pay over 
 to you. When his wife wants a dollar for shoes for herself and 
 the five children it takes him longer to unroll that wallet than 
 it did to unveil the Washington monument. When he dies, 
 which he does very reluctantly, he leaves his family well pro 
 vided for. Well, that s thrift. 
 
 The family then proceed to cut the thong off that wallet 
 close up to the leather and rip it up the back, preparatory to 
 giving a practical demonstration of spendthrift. 
 
 There is a vaudeville song which had great vogue a few 
 years ago which embodies a most excellent philosophy of thrift. 
 Being a minister I had to learn it from my sons, but they say I 
 sing it very well for a preacher. The refrain line runs like this: 
 "Every little bit added to what you ve got makes just a little 
 bit more." 
 
 That is the philosophy of worldly prudence and thrift, and 
 it is excellent, so far as it goes. The savings bank is the best 
 school of the best thrift. 
 
 A little tin savings bank on the mantel for the baby; a 
 little iron one on his table in the boy s room; a big vault of 
 chilled steel for father; a little corner in the bureau drawer 
 where everybody else can get at it, for mother. All good train 
 ing in saving. Lay by a little bit of it as it comes in. 
 
 A little bit out of every pay envelope, enough to patch the 
 leak in the roof, enough to provide for the "rainy day", enough 
 for the little holiday once in a while, enough for a new book 
 and an evening at "the show", enough for the dreary days of 
 sickness. 
 
 Enough to pay every bill when it is presented. Enough to 
 take up the note when it is due. Enough to save a man from 
 becoming the unmitigated nuisance that is always borrowing 
 
 307 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 quarters and halves, knowing they are obligations too small to 
 justify a dun. 
 
 Enough to save the humiliation of walking home because 
 you haven t the carfare. Enough to enable you to fearlessly 
 meet the eye of the deacon as he comes down the church aisle 
 with the basket. 
 
 Enough to make you sure of finding the dime in the corner 
 of your pocket when you dive after it. 
 
 Just enough in the bank so that when your wife needs a little 
 extra money for little emergency demands in the household she 
 won t come to you with the air of a woman who has made up 
 her mind to suicide or murder, and doesn t care very much which. 
 
 That s thrift. That makes a man rich on a salary, and no 
 man ever yet got rich on a salary. But he can acquire the 
 habit of thrift on the smallest salary, and that is much the same 
 thing as wealth. 
 
 Just a little bit more. Just enough to send the children to 
 school; enough to teach the boy a good trade or start him in 
 the way of good business; enough to marry the girls well and 
 happily; enough to keep an extra loaf in the larder and a cup 
 and a crust on the table for a friend who comes out of his 
 journey; enough for the waning strength and shortening hours 
 of old age; enough to maintain the little sinking fund to meet 
 the last expenses on earth. 
 
 "Every little bit added to what you ve got makes just a 
 little bit more." That s all good. It s excellent. It s sound 
 policy. It s practical wisdom. It s thrift. We ought to learn 
 it ourselves and teach it to our children. It is good judgment, 
 sensible foresight. Earn; save; lay by enough to keep the 
 wolf away from the door when the hearse with its sable plumes 
 halts to receive its freight of nothingness. And then? 
 
 You see, a man sort of hates to close his account and take 
 his name off the books of the bank of which he has been for so 
 many years an honest and honorable and respected customer. 
 Any man, thrifty or shiftless, dislikes to die. He hates to die. 
 For in all God s world there is nothing quite so worthless as a 
 dead man. A minute ago that man was worth fifty million 
 dollars. Now he is poorer than the poorest pauper in the alms- 
 house. He doesn t own the shroud in which he is clothed. 
 
 308 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 Nor the casket in which he sleeps. Nor the grave in which he 
 is interred. The shroud and casket have a monetary value. 
 The body has none. It hasn t even the value of individuality. 
 A minute ago he was the Honorable Dives Midas, or the Very 
 Reverend Melchizedek Howler, or Major-General Julius 
 Napoleon Centerfire; now he isn t anything. He is the saddest 
 and most insignificant of all human things, a "has been", for 
 we speak of him as " The late Mr. So and So". He used to be 
 somebody. He is less than nothing. For he isn t even "he" 
 nor " him " any more. He is " it ", with a little " i ". We sever 
 his last connection with the human race and classify him among 
 " things", taking away even his personal pronoun. No wonder 
 a thrifty man who has been somebody anybody in his day 
 hates to die. 
 
 And he doesn t have to die. There is no need of a thrifty, 
 forehanded man dying. Only the thriftless perish. If a man 
 begins in time the cultivation of a habit of thrift will keep him 
 alive forever. 
 
 If he saves his money he adds to his deposits in "The 
 Department Mercy" so beautifully described by Mr. Edward 
 L. Robinson in a paper read before a previous session of this 
 Association; if he saves his wages he saves his sympathy, his 
 patience, his kindliness; if every time he adds a little bit of his 
 money to what he has already got he adds a little bit to his 
 generosity, his neighborly helpfulness, his unselfishness, his 
 charity, he ll have just a little bit more every pay day. 
 
 Then when he appears at the little wicket in the big 
 pearly gate and says, "Well, here I am at last there s one 
 thing you can put off only so long"; St. Peter will say, "Have 
 you your deposit book?" 
 
 And the thrifty man will hand it over with an anxious face, 
 wondering if he is going to get one of those pleasant little "red 
 ink" reminders of an everlasting overdraft. 
 
 And the books won t agree, any more than the depositor s 
 book ever agrees with the cashier s account down here. And 
 just as the man is growing nervous the saint, who has been 
 comparing the two books with a smiling face, will say: 
 
 " Why, man, your book of Forgettery is an eternity out of 
 balance with your book of Remembrances. There are a thou 
 sand transactions you haven t entered at all." 
 
 309 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 And holding the thrifty man s book of " givings-away " in 
 one hand, he will open the gate wider than Sunday with the 
 other, and say: 
 
 "Come in, man, come in; you ve got a balance here you 
 can t spend in ten million years." 
 
 You see, down here we measure a thrifty man s fortune by 
 what he leaves. Up there they count it by what he gave away. 
 
 There are two systems of thrift. One is just as thrifty as the 
 other. Only one lasts a few million years longer than the other. 
 
 That s all. 
 
 To his fellows of the church he was always cordial 
 generous and open-hearted. In an address of welcome 
 to a brother of the ministry, who had come to fill the 
 pulpit of a Pasadena Church, he poured out his warmth 
 of affection in characteristic fashion : 
 
 We welcome you as soldiers welcome a comrade, a new man 
 on the firing line. A champion who is no friend of Goliath. 
 A man who will not fall down before he is pushed, a preacher 
 who preaches the truth by instinct and preaches the gospel 
 from habit. We welcome a shepherd who can tell a wolf from 
 a sheep without looking into a natural history. Who knows a 
 hypocrite by his whine and a Christian by his life, and a sinner 
 by his rags. You are welcome as the sunshine to the roses, 
 as the rains to the wheat fields, as the bees to the flowers, wel 
 come as December sunshine. Welcome as tourists in January. 
 Welcome as gifts on Christmas. Welcome as a bride at a 
 wedding, and a baby at a christening. 
 
 His addresses, while always richly humorous, con 
 tained many jewels of sound and wholesome philosophy: 
 
 Great things don t amount to much. Life is made up of 
 little things. You can travel out West for a thousand miles 
 and never see a mountain, but it is the greatest farming country 
 in the world. I have known men who were so great they were 
 of no account. You have seen trees so big you could not tie a 
 horse to them. I have heard preachers who knew so much you 
 could not understand a word they said, and once in a while you 
 go into a house where they have a Bible so big they never read 
 310 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 it. It is easier to be great than it is to be humble. I never 
 tried being great, but if it is any harder than it is to be humble, 
 I don t believe anybody on this earth ever was great. I never 
 stumbled over a two-story house in my life, and I have been 
 where there were thousands of them. Brick in the sidewalk. 
 Never had a lightning rod run through me sliver. Never 
 knocked my brains out stubbed my toe. I never had a cow 
 bite me, but I have had a little bit of a steel-blue wasp, not 
 nearly as big as the littlest cow in Jersey, prod me with its tiny 
 bayonet so that I could not catch my breath for five seconds, 
 and when I did catch it I hollered with it. 
 
 As toastmaster at a Board of Trade banquet, in his 
 introduction of the eloquent Southern speaker, Dean 
 Baker P. Lee of Los Angeles, his own Southern imagery 
 was no less eloquent: 
 
 I once saw a farm during a pilgrimage in Kentucky that I 
 would like to own. Not for the farm, but for the brook that 
 runs through it. It was a liquid run of innocent crookedness. 
 Crooked? A combination of Beef Trust and Standard Oil 
 would be straighter than the golden rule in comparison with it. 
 It goes wandering through the green meadow as though all the 
 year were June, and it had nothing to do but kill time and loiter 
 about in shady nooks and sunny beaches. Crooked? Not a 
 silver-plated shiner that flashes his glittering scales in the sun 
 light down in the limpid ripples can tell whether he is going up 
 stream or down. 
 
 The purple-plumed iron weed and the bending golden rod, 
 bowing to each other with stately grace across the singing brook 
 don t know whether they are standing on opposite sides, or if they 
 are on the same side, which side it is. All the way across that 
 meadow it plays hide and seek with itself, boxing the compass 
 in its erratic wanderings every hundred feet. It came into the 
 meadow, I think, when the wind anemones were blooming in 
 the lee of the hills that fringe the farm. "Oh, my beautiful 
 darlings," it said, " I will stay here near you." But the wind 
 flowers passed away and the violets opened their blue eyes and 
 the buttercups shone in the grasses of the meadows. " I have 
 lost my sweethearts," said fickle little brook, "but the meadow 
 
 311 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 is beautiful since you came into it, and I will stay here until 
 you are gone." 
 
 And it turned again and loitered to the north, where the 
 wind flowers died, and eddied to the east, where a bank of 
 violets looked shyly down at him with their great purple eyes, 
 and he strolled to the south, where the buttercups, none 
 abashed, laughed merrily in the golden sunlight, and he saunt 
 ered to the west, where the wild rose, shivering a little was 
 just trying on her new spring dress, which wasn t long enough 
 yet to cover her round, wine-red arms. And by and by the 
 violets closed their dear little eyes, and the buttercups faded, 
 and the little brook, who had got back nicely to the place where 
 he ran under the fence to get into the meadow when he first 
 saw the flowers, rippled slowly over the wild rose again, who 
 was now in full dress and wore her lovely pink bonnet, and had 
 clusters of buds all jthe way from her throat and shoulders 
 down to her waist. "Ah me," he murmured, "my friends are 
 gone, and I am so lonesome, I was just going to run down to the 
 sea and drown myself. But you are so beautiful I want to 
 stay here where I may see you." 
 
 And so Violet and Buttercup were laid away with poor 
 little Bloodroot and Sailor s-breeches, and by this time the 
 little brook had so many playmates that Wild Rose and Sweet 
 Brier only saw him when he came around to that corner of the 
 meadow. He ran about all the time singing down little runs 
 with the most inimitable trills, babbling with a family of great 
 hard-headed rocks that had settled on the edge of a pool and 
 gone into the moss business, whispering to the blue flags clus 
 tered under the low bank, playing with the tall reeds that 
 fringed the still pools, and lingering a long time with the groups 
 of colt s foot where the waters were shallow. There were so 
 many things to see and so much to say in this meadow, no 
 wonder the little brook ran about in it all summer before at last, 
 when the wild rose had thrown away the pretty pink bonnet 
 and put on the little red winter hood, and the rushes were 
 brown and the colt s foot withered, and the goldenrod was 
 gray and the purple iron-weed was plumed with tufts of feath 
 ery brown, it turned to the lower end of the meadow and creep 
 ing under the fence went lingering away to the river, running 
 very slowly, because it knew it was leaving Kentucky. 
 312 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 Never, to my knowledge, did he attend a banquet 
 or a large public gathering of any kind that, whether 
 on the programme or not, there was not an insistent 
 call for some contribution from him, and those who 
 heard him most often and knew him best, never ceased 
 to marvel how he rose to the occasion, no matter what 
 the topic was or the type of listeners there to be enter 
 tained, and how he always seemed to be full of the 
 subject in hand, with or without preparation. 
 
 One happy toast he gave at the wedding supper of 
 our son, Roy to Helen: 
 
 A toast to the bride! Fairest and sweetest of brides! And 
 a health to the bride means also "hail to the bridegroom", for 
 they are now and forever inseparable one in everything. An 
 hour ago, like the Dauphin of France and the "daughter of 
 Spain", 
 
 * He was the half part of a blessed man, 
 Left to be finished by such as she; 
 Whose fullness of perfection lay in him." 
 
 But Pastor Freeman and I "joined" these two silver currents 
 to "glorify the banks that bind them in." I am the richest 
 man but one in all this company. For I have just received the 
 largest wedding fee ever paid a minister in all this land. My 
 grateful son has enriched me with a daughter whose precious- 
 ness cannot be measured in any terms of value. And he most 
 happy man can say, with Valentine 
 
 "Why man, she is mine own, 
 And I as rich in having such a jewel, 
 As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearl, 
 The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold." 
 
 The bride ! God bless her ! A thousand times in a thousand 
 ways, God bless her! 
 
 It is impossible to give anylllustrations of his ability 
 to entertain in the social group, but always he was 
 the center and life of conversation, and it pleased him 
 
 313 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 much when I said after one of those occasions that his 
 mind sometimes reminded me of a rag bag. You could 
 put your hand in and you always brought out some 
 thing useful, but it never matched anything else that 
 was in there, and it was always a surprise. I have 
 often regretted that it was not possible to have had a 
 verbatim report of some of his most marvelous quips 
 and turns and keenest humor, which were frequently 
 born when he was waking out of a sound sleep in the 
 middle of the night or the early morning. His custom 
 of starting the day with a whistle or a song or a story 
 was largely the text for the constant cheer which he 
 preached by the spirit hour in and hour out under all 
 conditions of life. 
 
 On July 14, 1903, he was appointed as one of the 
 Commissioners of the City of Pasadena, serving on the 
 Fire and Parks Committee. He enjoyed this service 
 very much, because of his association with the men of 
 the city and of his vital interest in all that pertained to 
 municipal life. As is usual, the meetings of the city 
 commissioners did not always run smoothly, but he 
 was soon known as the oiler, and many a wordy war 
 was saved by an interjection of some remark of his, 
 which dissipated differences of opinion. If this might 
 be called a political appointment, though there was no 
 ground for such a term, it is the only one of the kind 
 that he ever occupied, and he accepted it because of his 
 personal friendship for Mr. William H. Vedder, who 
 was then Mayor of the City of Pasadena. 
 
 His evident delight in this appointment reveals 
 itself in a letter to an old time newspaper friend : 
 
 DEAR MAN: 
 
 Yes, I got paper which was all right and good, and your 
 letter, which was a hundred times better. 
 314 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 You are "doing a preaching stunt"? Did you just find it 
 out? You blessed old fellow your whole life has been a 
 gospel of good cheer, and patience and hope and courage. 
 Your life has been and is an evangel of manhood and manliness. 
 I love every bone in your great big body! 
 
 Yours as ever, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 Pastor Temple Baptist Church, Los Angeles. 
 Police Commissioner 1 
 Park " \ Pasadena. 
 
 Fire J 
 
 Everybody takes the hat off to ME! 
 
 His sixtieth birthday was the occasion for many 
 congratulations and felicitations from old friends and 
 new, and the ten years following that were among his 
 ripest and mellowest in kindly contemplation, serene 
 and joyous expectation of future usefulness. 
 
 To an inquiry sent him as to how it felt to be sixty, 
 he made this reply: 
 
 Well, my boy, it feels rather crowded. There are so many 
 more people in the world than there were when I took up my 
 homestead claim. When I landed on this planet, there wasn t 
 a soul in Los Angeles that I would go across the street to shake 
 hands with. (There was no city of Los Angeles, in fact.) 
 
 "A great many old people say they feel just as young at 
 sixty as they did at twenty. Is it that way with you?" 
 
 Not by forty happy years, my boy. No man and fewer 
 women, can be as young at sixty as at twenty. When I enter 
 a room now, I instinctively select the chair I want to sit in. I 
 pick out the one that is the easiest to get out of. For it takes 
 me longer to get up than it did at twenty. I do not love the 
 kind-hearted, stupid people who insist on my sitting down in a 
 cavernous easy chair with a backward inclination and a foot 
 rest which I cannot reach. For then there is a life-and-death 
 struggle when I would emerge. I find myself agreeing with the 
 Arab philosopher, "It is easier to walk than to run, to stand 
 still than to walk, to sit down than to stand, to lie down than 
 to sit up, to sleep than to wake." 
 
 315 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 "But you are still very vigorous?" 
 
 Oh, I do my daily stunts. But I don t rush at my work 
 with a war-whoop, as I used to. I have a stroke of paralysis 
 every day, right after my noontime dinner. It lasts about an 
 hour and is incurable. I break and lose more spectacles every 
 week than I used to break in five years when I didn t wear 
 any. I can hear a great deal better than I did in younger days. 
 For I can t hear a thing with my left ear, and I use that oh, 
 very, very often to rest the one I can hear with. So, though 
 I don t hear so much, I hear a great deal better. Much better. 
 
 "Is there as much fun in the world as there used to be?" 
 
 More; a great deal more. Because there are more people 
 in it. And people are the funniest things this side of the grave. 
 Monkeys tire me, but people amuse me. Yes, there is more fun 
 in the world than there used to be. And more sorrow and 
 trouble, and care, and heartache. And more goodness, and 
 love and gentleness, and kindness. And the laughter, and 
 sweetness, and gentleness has multiplied far more rapidly than 
 the trouble. 
 
 "Would you like to be young again?" 
 
 Indeed I would, my boy. And I m going to be when I 
 get to be about ten or twenty years older. But I don t want 
 to be young again in this world. Because then I would grow 
 old again. It is a sign of weakness intellectual, physical and 
 moral weakness to want to be younger in this life. A man 
 ought to be ashamed to have such a feeling. One of our boys, 
 Robert, once wrote to me on one of my birthdays: "A man s 
 years are his retainers, and the more birthdays he has the 
 stronger and greater is his following." That s about the way 
 it feels to be sixty. 
 
 AT 60 
 
 "Halt!" cry the bugles, down the column s length; 
 And nothing loath to halt and rest am I. 
 
 For summer heat hath somewhat taxed my strength, 
 And long the dusty ways before me lie. 
 
 The dew that glittered when the echoing horn 
 
 Called reveille to greet the waking day, 
 The cool sweet shadows of the cheery morn, 
 
 The birds that trilled the bugles roundelay. 
 316 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 Heated and hushed seems now the balmy air, 
 So soon its songs and pleasant shadows passed; 
 
 Our ambushed foes lurked in each woodland fair, 
 On every smiling plain we found them massed. 
 
 The light young heart that made a jest of life 
 And laughed at death when we broke camp at dawn, 
 
 Changed are their merry songs for shouts of strife, 
 Or hushed where valor mourns a comrade gone. 
 
 And loitering here awhile at "rest at ease", 
 
 I note the shadows falling to the east; 
 Behind me, plume crowned, looms the hill whose trees 
 
 At daybreak promised love, and joy and peace; 
 
 Beckoned us on, when morning time was bright, 
 
 To certainty of victory and rest; 
 And now tis afternoon; twill soon be night, 
 
 And I have passed the green hill s waving crest. 
 
 "Forward!" the bugles call; ready am I; 
 
 For though my step has lost its springing gait, 
 I am more prompt to march, and to obey. 
 
 Less apt to question and to hesitate. 
 
 Yet, when some belted trooper gallops by, 
 I lift my eyes, warned by the swift hoofs tramp, 
 
 And hail him, with the infantryman s cry, 
 
 "Ho, Comrade! tell me, how far is t to camp?" 
 
 The summer of 1905 was again spent in Europe, 
 our younger son accompanying us. Mr. Burdette went 
 as delegate to the World Conference of the Baptist 
 Church in London, where he was a conspicuous figure 
 in the conference, preaching in the pulpits of the London 
 Baptist Churches. He often referred to an English 
 custom which called upon him to read from the pulpit 
 of Shoreditch Chapel, Sunday, July 15, 1905, the follow 
 ing notice: 
 
 317 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 "Mrs. Henery wishes to return thanks to God for 
 safe deliverance", commenting that children would be 
 better born if all mothers were willing to publicly thank 
 God for them. 
 
 The trip at this time was confined to England and 
 France and he returned to take up his work at Temple 
 Church in the fall. 
 
 When we passed through Chicago on our return 
 from abroad, we stopped to see "the tribe ", especially 
 Mollie, who was not well. Anxiety filled our hearts as 
 we journeyed across the continent, and was not lessened 
 as the days went by. Mr. Burdette was devotedly 
 attached to her, as his frequent letters to he through the 
 years had proven. When the message came that she 
 had passed on, he went to his study, closed the door and 
 sought the comfort he had so often suggested to those 
 who had mourned. Then to his father he wrote: 
 
 SUNNYCREST, PASADENA, CAL. 
 
 DEAR FATHER: Saturday. 
 
 ( cannot write today. I cannot see the page and the pen 
 trails away by itself. The house is quiet and lonesome and 
 still, as though she had passed away from our own doors, here 
 at Sunnycrest. 
 
 Violet had planned a little home out here for her. She 
 was going to build a little cottage for her, down by the sea, 
 this winter, which should be her home for the quiet " afternoon 
 years". And the Father has taken her to her own home. 
 
 I did not realize how much she filled my life. I look for 
 her now in the rooms of this house, as I would not look if I 
 know she were yet in the land of the living. I find myself 
 looking into the door of an empty room, as though I half 
 expected to see her. Then she must be nearer to me now than 
 she was before she went away. 
 
 You cannot see the dear dead face. Nor can I. Then 
 she will never seem dead to us. We will be expecting to see 
 her, to hear her. And then, some day, we will. 
 318 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 I cannot write. I can only look out at the mountains and 
 wonder what it is that has happened to change all the world 
 in an hour. Only a few minutes ago I answered a telegram 
 from a man in Peoria. He had heard that some one dear to 
 him in Pasadena was dead. He wired me, in his fear, to find 
 out for him, tho he is a stranger to me. I wired back to him 
 "She is well." And while I prayed to hear good news from 
 Mollie, the telegraph tells me "She is dead." 
 
 God give you peace peace to all the households of her 
 kin that loved her so. 
 
 I am not coming East. The day when my coming could 
 have helped her has passed. If I have not written my love on 
 the days that have gone, it is but little use or need to speak it 
 now. Living, she knew well how dearly I loved her. She 
 knows it even better now. 
 
 During the spring of 1908, he wrote to his sister Jo: 
 We are circumnavigating the old mill pond the same old 
 way, with every hour of the day filled in. I had a very stren 
 uous time yesterday afternoon, a trouble that focussed upon 
 the foolishest and uselessest thing of all things to do; the 
 writing of an anonymous letter. I began with two of the people 
 involved, in my study, and sent for one after another until 
 there were seven prosecutors and defendants, changing sides 
 from time to time as new evidence was introduced. It was a 
 very stormy, trying four hours, but before I let go of them, I 
 had secured the necessary amount of admissions and conces 
 sions, made them all shake hands, delivered seven personal 
 and one general little lecture, and sent them away, all happy 
 and relieved, five of them smiling, two of them weeping. Guess 
 how many women there were! 
 
 So you may know what a relief it was to go in the evening 
 to a very beautiful reception at the opening of the Valley Hunt 
 Club, where everybody had on their "glad rags", where every 
 body was smiling, where the rooms were noisy with the din of 
 happiness, real or assumed, and merrymaking, music and 
 dancing. Considering what I had crawled through in the 
 afternoon, I felt like the Prodigal Son, and, of course, took 
 all the music and dancing and merrymaking to myself. I know 
 there was, even in that concourse of happy people, heartache 
 
 319 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 and concealed pain, and, no doubt, the usual amount of human 
 jealousy, but it was not on the surface and I did not see it and 
 I did not think about it, and if I had not been an old man 
 and a minister of the gospel, I would have danced. Then the 
 rooms would have been cleared. 
 
 Why is it that the people who have most need of dancing, 
 who dwell every day of the week with human sorrow and sin 
 and foolishness and weakness and trouble, are not permitted 
 by the frowns of society to dance the most? When I get to 
 Heaven, where we can do as we please, if any angel strikes up a 
 strain of "rag-time" on a harp, you will see your old brother 
 tripping it down the golden street. I find I am growing 
 unministerial. 
 
 As the following summer approached the need of 
 rest and change developed into a short trip to Europe, 
 but one of great delight to Mr. Burdette, as it was our 
 first trip to Ireland. "Pilgrim s Progress" had been 
 the delight of his early boyhood, and many and many 
 a time had it furnished a topic, an illustration or a 
 quotation for his later literary work. His diary for 
 July 22, 1908, was headed: 
 
 In Bunyan Land. At Elstow, where John Bunyan lived 
 a few years after his marriage. On to the Moathouse in Elstow 
 Green, where Bunyan used to preach. Sat in his pulpit seat. 
 Full of drawers. One old bench original in "tiny children s 
 room". Elstow Church, where Bunyan used to ring the bell 
 climbed the steep winding stairs to belfry 48 of them with 
 very high falls. Both of us probably lamed for life. Loitered 
 across village green, where Bunyan used to play "tit-cat" on 
 Sunday and where he was converted. Back to Bedford. Saw 
 the old jail steps. Visited Bunyan Baptist Meeting House, 
 where are his sixty books in early edition " Pilgrim s Progress" 
 in 108 languages. Bought six copies of "Pilgrim s Progress" 
 published by Elstow Meeting. My fondest boyhood dreams 
 did not dare to picture me enjoying such a rare day fifty years 
 hence. 
 
 320 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 On his sixty-fourth birthday he was in Ireland and 
 wrote a characteristic letter to a friend, a deacon of 
 Temple Baptist Church, breathing the same sane 
 philosophy: 
 
 THE SOUTHERN HOTEL, 
 WATERVILLE (COUNTY KERRY), IRELAND, 
 
 July 30th, 1908. 
 MY DEAR DR. DOZIER: 
 
 I woke up this morning with the feeling upon me that my 
 figure had altered during the night. And upon taking my tem 
 perature with the calendar, I found that my diagnosis was cor 
 rect. I was 63 when I went to bed last night, and this morning 
 I am 64. However, the change is perfectly normal and I know 
 it will never happen again. It will be something else the next 
 time. 
 
 Well, I am well satisfied to grow old. As the woman said 
 about her husband s being resigned to die, "He has to be". 
 I have no desire to be younger, and I wouldn t want to live 
 my life over, if I was offered the chance. I haven t made the 
 best of it I could have done, but I have lived it. The "after 
 noon land" has been very pleasant to me; I am sure that "at 
 evening time it will be light", and I will be glad to see the 
 morning dawn, for that will begin the new life the only new 
 opportunity for living better that we will have. 
 
 Give my birthday greeting to my "dear children", and 
 say to them they have never put one white hair in my head, 
 nor an ache into my heart. They have been, and they are, 
 a daily joy to me. They are the light of my evening time. 
 Morning and evening do I thank God for bringing them into 
 my life. " My dearly beloved, my joy and my crown." God 
 bless you, every one. 
 
 Affectionately your Pastor, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 From the time he began newspaper work upon the 
 Peoria Transcript in the late 60 s until the end of his 
 life he was never without a newspaper connection. 
 These included Peoria Transcript, Peoria Review, Bur- 
 
 21 321 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 lington Hawk-Eye, Brooklyn Eagle, Philadelphia Times 
 and finally the Los Angeles Times. 
 
 His contributions to the Times began not long after 
 he came to California in 1899, and continued to within 
 a few months of his death. 
 
 His first contributions were to the Times Magazine, 
 and were in the style of his usual humorous philosophy. 
 In 1900, when he made his first trip to Europe, he made 
 an agreement with the Times to write his impressions in 
 a weekly letter to the Magazine. After his retirement 
 from the active pulpit of Temple Baptist Church, he 
 was asked by the Times to become its pastor and occupy 
 the column pulpit in the daily newspaper, and while 
 there was never any formal acceptance of the offer, he 
 continued through many years to contribute a column 
 two or three times each week. 
 
 His relation with the Times staff was always the 
 same inspiring, genial and delightful one that made him 
 beloved of the Hawk-Eye in the early days of his news 
 paper work. There was always a cordial and affection 
 ate relation between him and General Harrison Gray 
 Otis, the owner of the Times, and this is indicated in 
 many letters that passed between them touching on 
 topics of common interest, and in their frequent 
 exchanges of personal courtesies. 
 
 On October 1, 1910, the Times Building was de 
 stroyed by an explosion of dynamite, the explosion 
 planned and carried out by part of the band of dyna 
 miting union labor leaders because of the hatred 
 incurred by the Times for its persistent and insistent 
 fight for the open shop. Fire followed immediately 
 upon the explosion, and twenty-one employees of the 
 Times lost their lives in the tragedy. 
 
 Within an hour after the awful disaster, some mem- 
 322 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 ber of the Times staff telephoned the house to ask Mr. 
 Burdette and myself to come to Los Angeles, but the 
 message was not responded to until daylight, when a 
 second telephone message brought to my consciousness 
 the conditions in Los Angeles. Mr. Burdette was 
 spending the night in Riverside, and so he did not get 
 the communication. 
 
 I got in my machine soon after daybreak and went 
 to Los Angeles, going first to the Receiving Hospital, 
 where I saw arranged in various cots some of the victims 
 of that awful disaster. Upon inquiring, I found there 
 were others at the various hospitals, and I went at once 
 to the Clara Barton Hospital, where Arlie Elder, the 
 friend of my son Roy, was dying. I remained there to 
 give such assistance to the family as was possible, and 
 then began the rounds of the other hospitals. 
 
 General Otis, who was on his way home from a trip 
 to Mexico, reached Los Angeles about two o clock in 
 the afternoon, and together with two or three members 
 of the Times staff, and the family, I went to the South 
 ern Pacific Depot to meet him. With his characteristic 
 unrelentless vigor, and stirred by deepest sympathy for 
 those who had suffered, he stepped to the platform of 
 the car, and before he descended, raising his right hand 
 and extending his other to the crowd, he said in a most 
 dramatic voice, "The fight will still go on!" Fearless 
 as ever, he returned to his home, to which private 
 detectives were soon called because of a suspicious 
 package found under the window of his own residence, 
 and which, taken to the middle of the street and 
 exploded, proved to be another attempt made upon 
 his personal life. 
 
 As soon as Mr. Burdette returned to Pasadena, we 
 again took up the rounds where sympathy was needed, 
 
 323 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 and through those trying hours and days he proved 
 himself again the comforter and the good soldier that 
 he was, absolutely fearless. The matter of conducting 
 the services for the dead was a very serious undertaking 
 at a time when all Los Angeles was stirred, some with 
 feelings of revenge, and others with a criminal deter 
 mination to still continue their dastardly work. 
 
 I well remember the morning he went to his study 
 to prepare the oration which was to be held in Temple 
 Auditorium, in a pulpit where love and sympathy and 
 salvation had been the continued theme. He went 
 with an earnest prayer in his heart that he might be 
 just to all, comforting to those who needed it, sympa 
 thetic with the weakness and foolishness of those who 
 needed sympathy, fearless of those who under their 
 strained mental condition might seek to do further 
 harm. As can be well understood, all were under 
 special strain. 
 
 We who were responsible for conditions of the 
 Auditorium had it thoroughly guarded and inspected, 
 for of course there was to be gathered on this occasion 
 all who sympathized with the Times. Trained nurses 
 were provided to look after those who might need them, 
 and with a hush and bated breath the audience gath 
 ered. Gen. Adna R. Chaffee, retired, my personal 
 friend, asked to sit with me in my box, not knowing 
 what might happen. 
 
 On the stage were fourteen gray caskets, all but lost 
 in a wilderness of flowers and flags, the offerings of the 
 people. As Mr. Burdette, revered by the Times men as 
 though he were their formal chaplain, stepped on to the 
 platform, he never seemed more serene, more coura 
 geous. His voice, tender, yet strong, lacking nothing in 
 fire, yet full of solace, with a heart vibrant in its sym- 
 324 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 pathy for the living even as it bled with grief for those 
 that were gone, Mr. Burdette delivered a most masterly 
 oration. This was afterwards emblazoned in bronze on 
 the monument that stands as monitor over the remains 
 of the victims of the disaster, the oration being headed, 
 "Sons of Duty", with these verifying words: "From 
 the thrilling discourse pronounced by Rev. Robert J. 
 Burdette of Ours over the lifeless fragments of the 
 victims/ 
 
 High tide in a sea that washes every shore of the world a 
 tide whose searching fingers with the sensitive touch of the 
 blind reach wherever water runs or the sun shines the great 
 pulsing tide of human events that men call "news" and the 
 world-circling brotherhood of the press calls "The Story". 
 Clicking off the keys of a thousand wires from a thousand 
 centers of interest; wig- wagging from the fighting tops of the 
 battleships of all nations; the all-beholding sun, serving his 
 apprenticeship to the new service of the press, flashing his 
 helios from the signal station cf the armies of the world ; sema 
 phores repeating the tale of scientific and exploring expeditions 
 across the deserts all the news of Babel, translated into the 
 Morse alphabet, thronging with more tongues than Rumor 
 into the busy rooms of the Times. 
 
 Midnight, and at editorial desks in news rooms, at the 
 cases of the compositors and the machines of the linotypers, 
 at the key of the Western Union and Postal Telegraphs, down 
 in the press room, under the strong lights of the engravers 
 tables everywhere Life, exultant, joyous, abundant. Men and 
 women happy in their work; enthusiastic in their occupation. 
 
 Turn of the tide. The hour of the midnight passing the 
 glittering battalions of the constellations in review. Orderly 
 march of the stars, crossing the zenith, ending the journey of 
 Yesterday, beginning the campaign of Today, still moving 
 toward the ever-vanishing camp of Tomorrow. The hand of 
 the Mighty Angel who keeps the calendar of God tore off the 
 page dated "Friday, September 30th, 1910", and revealed, 
 white and clean, unsullied as the petals of the lily of the resur 
 rection, "Saturday, October 1st" the newest, purest, happiest 
 
 325 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 day in the old, old world, a gift from the hand of God, ready 
 for this world of men to write the story of the new day on the 
 tablets of history in such characters of light or darkness as 
 they would. 
 
 It is the turn of the Tide. "One o clock and a pleasant 
 morning. All s Well!" called the Angel of the Watch. 
 
 Duty, eldest daughter of God, passed along the lines of 
 men standing at their appointed posts in the world of toil 
 and struggle, doing the bidding of the great Master Workman 
 with the hands and brains and hearts of working men. Clad 
 in the uniform of God s workers, the garb of workingmen, 
 their hands holding the implements of trade and profession 
 wage-earners and bread winners, every one. Gathering from 
 the ends of the earth and shaping for the intelligence of men 
 the story of the day the news of the world; its deeds, its 
 hopes, its fears, its pleasures and ambitions, its triumphs and 
 defeats, its loyalty and treacheries, its worship and its blas 
 phemies; the story of how men were keeping faith with God, 
 or violating His first commission, when He placed man in Eden 
 when all the world was Eden with the command to dress 
 the garden and to keep it fair to keep it for God. 
 
 Even God cannot keep His world without the yoke fellow 
 ship of men. Sings Elizabeth Browning for the great violin 
 maker: 
 
 "Should my hand slack, I would rob God; 
 He could not make Antonio Stradivarius violins 
 Without Antonio." 
 
 Duty walked down the busy line of these sons of fidelity. 
 She called the roll of honor beside the cradle of the new-born 
 day. 
 
 "Churchill Harvey-Elder, assistant city editor; J.Wesley 
 Reaves, private secretary to Harry Chandler; Harry L. Crane, 
 assistant telegraph editor; R. L. Sawyer, telegraph operator; 
 John Howard, compositor." 
 
 And one by one, with voices clear and steady, the men 
 answered : 
 
 "Here!" 
 
 And Duty went on calling the roll: 
 
 "J. C. Galliher, linotype operator; Grant Moore, machin 
 ist; Edward Wasson, compositor; Elmer Frink, linotype oper- 
 326 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 ator; Eugene Caress, linotype operator; Frank Underwood, 
 compositor; Fred Llewellyn, linotype operator." 
 
 One by one the men lifted their heads from their work and 
 answered in tones strong and confident: 
 
 "Here!" 
 
 Again Duty called the names of the relief on guard: 
 
 "Charles Haggerty, pressman; Charles Gulliver, composi 
 tor; Carl Sallada, linotype operator; Howard Cordaway, lino 
 type operator; Don E. Johnson, linotype operator; Harry L. 
 Flynn, linotype operator; W. G. Tunstall, linotype operator. 
 
 Clear and strong came the voices of the men: 
 
 "Here!" 
 
 And Duty reported to the Heavenly Father the Great 
 Master Workman: 
 
 "Every man in his place in the ranks. Every man in the 
 uniform of God s workmen the garb of a workingman, with 
 the weapons of his service, the implements of his trade and 
 calling in his hand. Each man fully equipped with the gifts 
 of God for his appointed work clear brain, skilful hand, 
 faithful heart. Each man earning his daily bread with his 
 daily toil. As the Father worketh hitherto , and as Jesus the 
 Son wrought at his earthly task until he could cry, It is fin 
 ished , so these children of Duty serve at their appointed tasks 
 until He who gave them toil shall call them to rest." 
 
 "Know they that they work amid unseen perils?" 
 
 "They know," replied Duty, "but of that they speak not. 
 They know they eat their bread on the smouldering crater of a 
 volcano, but of that they speak not. Their hands are steady; 
 laughter falls sometimes from their lips; courage throbs in 
 their hearts. They have their commission of Thee, and they 
 ask no more. In this consciousness, Mighty Father, they 
 stand sure, stand fast, stand firm, stand true . It is the blazon 
 on the standard of the journal in whose ranks they serve." 
 
 High and clear, like a herald trumpeting the advent of the 
 new day with the prophecy of hope, rang the voice of the 
 Angels of the Watch: 
 
 "One o clock and ten minutes! A pleasant morning! 
 All s Well!" 
 
 Crash and thunder of the forces of destruction. Roaring 
 of the powers of murder and red-handed anarchy. The purple 
 
 327 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 night is polluted with the lurid flames leaping from the abyss 
 of horror. The silver stars are eclipsed by the clouds of stran 
 gling smoke. The swaying walls fall inward, crackling with the 
 flames; set on fire by fiendish hate by the crawling cowardice 
 of assassination. The night shrills with awe and terror. 
 
 The eyes that see the awful holocaust pray for blindness 
 to shield them from the spectacle. The ears that hear the 
 screams for help, thrilled with death agony, pray for deafness 
 to shut out all sounds that affright the night. Earth yawns 
 to hide the terror. Angels look over the battlements of heaven 
 in wondering amaze that such chaos of sin and crime might 
 be in the world for which Christ died. Hell itself shudders 
 with fear at the sight of the hell more terrible than its own 
 flaming dungeons which its emissary had kindled on earth. 
 
 And in the midst of this, men tell us to be calm, and to 
 "suspend judgment". But to most men, God gave red blood 
 instead of ice water for their pulsing veins and human hearts. 
 Did you see young Howard, keeping his vigil of forty hours 
 watching on the crumbling brink of that awful pit of death at 
 First and Broadway for his father, noting every warped and 
 twisted beam of steel dragged from above the bodies of the 
 dead, watching the sifting of every spadeful of cinders, until 
 at last the workmen uncovered what had been his father? 
 
 Stand beside him, fasting, yet not knowing hunger, unsleep 
 ing yet unwearied; and ask him to "suspend judgment!" Go 
 to these mourners here today, whose aching hearts cannot know 
 until the great judgment day which casket of gray holds the 
 dust dearer to them than their lives, ask them to be judicial in 
 act, justice to all in their hearts! Not twenty-four hours ago, 
 some man barking at the heels of the mourners, publicly cen 
 sured the "exasperating attitude of the Times". 
 
 The exasperating attitude of the Times! What is its 
 attitude? Standing here today, a fellow-mourner with this 
 immense concourse of mourners. Its body draped with the 
 coarse sackcloth of woe; its face veiled with the fold of crepe 
 which hides its tear-blinded eyes as it bows itself in speechless 
 anguish above its dead. Look upon this circle of caskets, 
 jewel cases of precious dust whom does this scene " exasper 
 ate"? I tell you, there are men sitting here beside the wives 
 and children and the fellow-workmen of these heroic dead, their 
 328 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 comrades and yours Harry Andrews, Harry Chandler, Gen. 
 Harrison Gray Otis each one of whom would give his own life 
 to call back to desk and case, to machine and press, these dead 
 who died at their posts. 
 
 Once more Duty marshals her guard before the Great 
 Commander. Once more she calls the roll of fidelity. 
 
 "Are they all here?" 
 
 Every man. Not one shirked his duty. Not one fled from 
 his post. To the immortal glory of the dead, and the honor of 
 the living, not one woman who wrought at her task in that 
 building perished. In the wild storm of fear and death there 
 was no panic. The strong helped the weak. The brave en 
 couraged the fearful. The calm soothed the nervous. Those 
 who escaped live with honor. Those who died stand here in 
 their ranks to answer their names, robed in the white garments 
 of victory; all marks of pain gone from their faces; the calloused 
 palms of toil soft already with the tranquility of their rest. 
 Every man whose name was called on earth, has answered 
 "here" before the throne. 
 
 Fragrant with honor be their names forever. Green as 
 the palms that will wave above them in Hollywood be their 
 memories. Everlasting peace be to the lives that suffered. 
 God s will his righteous will his will of justice be done. 
 
 When brutal feet are trampling 
 Upon the common weal, 
 
 Thou dost not bid us bend and writhe 
 Beneath the iron heel; 
 
 In Thy name we assert our right- 
 By sword, or tongue, or pen, 
 
 Even the headsman s ax may flash 
 Thy message unto men. 
 
 Thy will, It bids the weak be strong, 
 
 It bids the strong be just; 
 No lip to fawn, no hand to beg, 
 
 No brow to seek the dust. 
 Wherever man oppresses man 
 
 Beneath Thy liberal sun, 
 Oh, Lord, be there Thine arm made bare, 
 
 Thy righteous will be done, 
 
 329 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 When the procession moved away from Temple 
 Auditorium, guarded as it was by a platoon of police, 
 to the corner of Hill and Fifth Street, where there was 
 waiting a line of street cars, one for each casket and the 
 friends, there was never seen probably in all the world 
 such a funeral procession as those trolley cars to Holly 
 wood Cemetery, and the little man, with his courage, 
 fearlessness of speech, heart filled with sympathy and 
 love, might be said to have been the central figure of it 
 all. It was one of the greatest efforts of his life, and 
 several days followed before he could return to the 
 normal activities, so stirred was he with the sense of 
 cruel injustice to the innocent, his thankfulness that 
 our own son Roy who had but recently left the Times, 
 was not one of the victims, and his outspoken condem 
 nation of the spirit which had made this possible. 
 
 On November 15, 1911, in the cemetery at Holly 
 wood, a granite memorial by the Times in memory of 
 its martyred dead, was dedicated, and as chaplain of 
 the Times, Dr. Burdette delivered the dedicatory 
 oration: 
 
 "It is the cause/ said Napoleon Bonaparte, "and not the 
 death that makes the martyr". For the mere fact of death 
 is a thing common to all men, hero and coward, saint and sin 
 ner, patriot and traitor. But now and again in the great 
 crises of Time, when the thought of the selfish world is set on 
 common things like wealth and fame, and pleasure, God calls 
 for his reserves a man or a platoon of the 7000 that have 
 not bent the knee to Baal, to stand forth and die nobly, 
 splendidly, sublimely, that right and justice and freedom shall 
 have their witnesses on the earth. 
 
 So Socrates drank the deadly hemlock, as one who pours a 
 libation to life, and none died but the men who gave the teacher 
 the poison. So Jesus Christ died on the tree of death, and now 
 to look at the cross, which he made a throne of life, is to live 
 forever. So died Nathan Hale, on a common gibbet, by the 
 330 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 strangling shame of the hangman s noose, and schoolboys today 
 kiss his name on the page of their history, and repeat, as a 
 living watchword of patriotism his dying words. So died Abra 
 ham Lincoln, and the simple grandeur of his life blossomed in 
 his death, and its fruitage comes to its harvest all the days of 
 all the years. So died these men whose memory we come 
 today to honor. 
 
 The Times newspaper, at its own cost, gently and with all 
 appreciation, refusing the desire of hundreds to unite in the 
 erection of this testimonial, places this memorial, and dedicates 
 it to the memory of the heroic men, soldiers in the ranks of 
 industry, who gave their lives as witnesses to the righteousness 
 of industrial freedom, and who now sleep beneath the shadow 
 of this shaft. But it consecrates it to the living cause for 
 which they died. 
 
 This monument is erected here, not that these martyrs 
 may not be forgotten. Love will remember them, and teach 
 their names and their heroism to their children s children, 
 writing the epitaphs of the beloved dead upon the fleshly 
 tablets of the heart, more lasting than inscriptions graven in 
 granite and bronze. But it is here placed, "lest we forget"! 
 For it is a teacher who will not only commemorate the heroism 
 of the men who died, but will inspire anew the cause which 
 lives. 
 
 Not only a monument to the dead, but a lighthouse for 
 the living. In the stormy, overclouded days and the dark 
 and starless nights, which yet may come in the life of the 
 nation, it will shine through the tempest as shines a star. It 
 will gleam across the tossing waves, a light that at once warns 
 of danger and guides to safety. So long as it stands, into the 
 storm and stresses of our warring days, into our hearts growing 
 callous and selfish and forgetful, it will call with the thrill of 
 the dead years come to life 
 
 "Remember.," 
 
 "Remember," the dead will call from their graves. "Re 
 member, not us, but the cause for which we gave the measure 
 less price of our lives. Not us, but the hideous thing which 
 slew us as we toiled. Remember the foul spirit of hate and 
 destruction that in one swift hour of desolation offered upon 
 the bloody altar of anarchy a score of innocent lives, a great 
 
 331 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 household of industry, enterprise, intelligence, and much more 
 than all this." 
 
 For one cannot trace the way of the waves of this awful 
 tragedy, as they recoil in a hundred directions from the smoking 
 ruins in which the blood of the slain men strove to quench the 
 lurid flames set on by murder. The score of human lives can 
 be counted and listed in the report of the massacre. But the 
 homes palled in mourning, the wives robed in the dark habili 
 ments of widowhood, the laughing little children turned into 
 weeping orphans, love shrouding its sobbing figure in sackcloth, 
 the loneliness bringing heartache into the true camaraderie 
 and loyal yoke-fellowships of labor who shall measure this 
 in the statistics of cruelty and crime? 
 
 The spirit of brutality that is not content to rejoice in the 
 sorrow that is all too common to humanity, but must take the 
 joy and laughter and love that make life s burdens light and 
 its sorrows sweet, and transform the laughter into tears, the 
 joy into bitterness of sorrow, the love into agony of woe, that 
 makes motherhood childless and childhood fatherless what 
 punishment can be too great for such a spirit of hate and malice? 
 Oh, Thou Righteous Judge of all the earth deal Thou 
 between the mourner and the murderer deal righteously. 
 Oh, Eternal Judge, between the bereaved and the destroyer 
 between the dead and those whose hands are crimson with his 
 blood! "Shall not the Judge of all the Earth do right?" 
 
 A noble deed transfigures the commonplace into the sub 
 lime. Not so many men were slain at Thermopylae as at Water 
 loo, but the glory of that narrow pass is told in the inscription 
 above the little heap of immortal dust. " Go, traveler, tell at 
 Sparta that we died here in obedience to her sacred laws!" 
 
 The holiness of the law has outlived the kingdom of Sparta 
 and the republic of Greece. A score of mission buildings in 
 the west are statelier and nobler in architecture than one on 
 the plaza at San Antonio, but the message to the world " Ther 
 mopylae had her messenger of defeat. The Alamo had none", 
 has immortalized it. " Hot Springs " is commonplace. " Ther 
 mopylae" has its place in deathless song. "The cotton wood" 
 is common and cheap as it sounds. "The Alamo" inspires 
 the patriot and the poet. In all the annals of printerdom in 
 all the stories of newspaperdom, there is no page of history of 
 332 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 the types that thrills in all the deep emotions of the tragic 
 drama like this midnight scene in the Times Building, when 
 these men, printers and linotype men and editors and press 
 men, went down to death and ascended to immortality. Heroes 
 of free journalism. Martyrs in the great cause of industrial 
 freedom. 
 
 Beneath this shaft of granite and bronze quietly rests their 
 hallowed dust. Under the shadow of pine and palm, emblems 
 of strength and victory, while dreams of peace come to illumine 
 the caressing darkness. How like an afternoon of June the 
 November sunlight covers them, tenderly as a mother draws 
 her veil over the face of the little one she has lulled to sleep 
 with the sweetest music in the world. For them, resting in 
 the dear, cool arms of our mother earth, no fearsome dreams, 
 no waking unto weary days, no troublous things shall ever come. 
 
 For "all their storms are quiet as the sun; and all their 
 restless seas are still and perfumed as the blossoming shore". 
 Lay thy sweet darkness tenderly upon their faces, oh, gentle 
 Earth, even as lovingly as thou didst upon thy breast the thorn- 
 crowned head of the Martyr King, tortured to his death. Upon 
 their breasts we lay the pilgrim staff we break above them at 
 their journey s end. Roses for perfume, lilies for peace, laurel 
 for their glory we twine above their brows. Against the stately 
 pile that keeps their names we rest the inverted torch that 
 means for them not the quenching of the flame of life, but the 
 dawning of the star of immortality. 
 
 Above your dust, oh, sacred dead, we consecrate this 
 monument. We dedicate it to the cause for which you died. 
 To free labor for free men; to the unfettered hand; to the 
 unshackled mind; to the free soul. 
 
 To the loving memory of the old and the glorious hope of 
 the new day, when all men shall know each other even as God 
 knows men; when the brotherhood of man shall be a fact world 
 wide, even as it is a truth of God; when all the mistakes of all 
 of us; when all the cruel misunderstandings that have separated 
 and embittered our lives; when all the bitter wrongs we have 
 inflicted, and all the cruel wrongs we have suffered, shall be 
 corrected by infinite wisdom and eternal righteousness; and 
 all the evil and sorrow of our lives shall be fainter than the 
 memory of the vanished cloud of a summer long gone by. 
 
 333 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 So moving were these two addresses, a challenge 
 was based on the hearing or reading of them when the 
 jury was being impanelled for the murder trial which 
 followed. A demand was made of the Judge that Dr. 
 Burdette be cited to explain his speech on the occasion 
 of the dedication of the monument. The Court was 
 too wise to give Dr. Burdette another opportunity. 
 
 But the opportunity came when there was a service 
 held in memory at the Hollywood Cemetery. Time 
 may have somewhat softened his pronouncement, but 
 his memory had not forgotten when he spoke: 
 
 I once stood on the historic plain where the mountains 
 look on Marathon, and Marathon looks on the sea. Almost 
 unconsciously I uncovered my head before the great mound, 
 the Soros, where sleep the heroic Greeks who on an August day 
 2500 years ago fell as they repelled the outnumbering hordes 
 that swarmed against their little band like locusts of the 
 wilderness. 
 
 Two American boys at my side bared their heads. And 
 their American mother bent to kiss the fragrant asphodel 
 the meadow flower trodden in days of myth and fable by the 
 feet of heroes, and swept by the trailing garments of goddess 
 and nymph. We reverenced the memory of the men who 
 died there. The heroic Greeks, their allies and their bondmen, 
 in defense of their homes and western civilization. Twenty- 
 five centuries and men remember with reverence their heroism 
 and sacrifice and their victory. Loving and loyal hands 
 builded above them this mound of earth, baptized in their 
 blood. 
 
 On the summit of a hill shaped by the hands of the Creator, 
 the mecca year by year of thousands of Americans who make 
 reverent pilgrimage thither, a graceful shaft of granite com 
 memorates the heroism and sacrifice of another little band of 
 heroes standing to the death between their homes and oppres 
 sion; faithful unto death in their devotion to human freedom 
 national liberty. Bunker Hill is hallowed by devotion and 
 sacrifice. 
 
 334 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 Heroes of the bow and spear were these Greeks of the olden 
 days. Men of the rifle and bayonet were the heroes of Bunker 
 Hill. They met death, running at the head of the charging 
 columns with shouts of defiance, and smote him in the face as 
 they fell. 
 
 Here, in our own day, sleep heroes as illustrious. Cham 
 pions of industrial freedom, slain by the red hands of anarchy, 
 smiting under cover of the darkness. 
 
 "Keep thee from me," cried the knight in the days of 
 chivalry, giving his foeman ample time to prepare for onset. 
 The voice of the bugle, singing its challenge high and clear, 
 carries to the enemy the advance of the soldier. A challenging 
 shot, fired wide, was the old-time shout of the sailor, bidding 
 the enemy clear his decks for action. At Marathon, at Water 
 loo, at Bunker Hill, heroes were slain by heroes. 
 
 But these heroic souls who sleep here were murdered as 
 they toiled at peaceful, honorable labor for their daily bread. 
 Three archvillainies there were that conspired against them. 
 Cowardice drew the veil of darkness hiding the movements of 
 the creatures lifting red hands against the lives of the uncon 
 scious victims. Murder planned the hellish machine which 
 could most effectually destroy property and life together. 
 Treacherous anarchy, hating all law and order, applied the 
 detonating match that wrought midnight confusion and sudden 
 death. 
 
 Then under false names, that were lies, under many dis 
 guises, skulking and hiding, in fear and hate, the conspirators 
 fled and for a time escaped. 
 
 These things are simple, plain statements of fact. These 
 things are true. They are not spoken in bitterness. If I had 
 a tongue of lightning, a voice of thunder, and my words were 
 leaping flame, I could never tell what happened on that awful 
 October midnight in the Times building when these men were 
 murdered. I am prejudging the case of no man. But some 
 body wrought this deed of anarchy; somebody slew these 
 innocent men. 
 
 May God speedily clear from all stain of suspicion the 
 names of all innocent men. And may he as surely bring to 
 the bar of judgment the guilty ones. Can any true man refuse 
 to say "Amen" to this? 
 
 335 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Beside these martyred dead we have no thought for ven 
 geance. Should we strive to utter such a word the sleeping 
 martyred ones would waken to its harshness in this holy place, 
 and whisper to us, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." Our 
 lips are sealed. But today, as thousands of years ago, the 
 voice of a murdered brother rises to God from the sodden 
 ground. "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" 
 
 As we wait here, the quiet dead teach us peace and tender 
 forgiveness. The martyrs have forgiven their murderers. 
 But have their murderers forgiven them? If so, they will 
 show their forgiveness to the living. 
 
 God s angels of grace keep watch over this sacred ground, 
 God s love keeps it from profanation by unclean hands. Here, 
 at this holy trysting place, its grasses watered by tears of all 
 who love honor, may the Four Daughters of God, Mercy and 
 Truth, Peace and Righteousness, meet to greet and kiss each 
 other about this sepulcher of the martyrs, this beautiful, pitiful 
 mingling place of broken hearts. Their common grief makes 
 them one in their unceasing sorrow. For the kiss that rests 
 tenderly upon one perfumed blossom above the commingled 
 ashes here, touches every sleeping heart beneath, as the lips 
 of God touch the souls of all his race of men. Here comes the 
 earliest sunrise with its glory of hope. Here the meadow lark 
 sings his matin to the morn. Here the evening shadows linger 
 long and tenderly at the time of the evensong and twilight. 
 And here, when the stars look tenderly down upon the shrine 
 of human sacrifice, the mocking bird enchants the night with 
 the sweetness of melody. 
 
 Death made his darkness noble when he drew into the 
 shadows the men who sleep here. This is a temple of nobility, 
 star lighted forever. Fold them tenderly on thy soothing 
 breast, mother earth, rest their tired eyes in thy comforting 
 darkness. Hush all their fears and pains in the softness of thy 
 cool, enfolding arms. Let them hear only the whispering of 
 the grasses growing so lightly above them; the bird song at 
 morn and even and at midnight; the sweetest of all the tender 
 echoes of the voices they loved the best on earth. The laughter 
 of little children. The lips that speak, spoke their names on 
 earth with tender intonations of love. The strong voices of 
 the friendship of loyal comrades faithful unto death. God 
 336 
 
VERSATILITY OF TALENTS 
 
 who hath measured unto them the anguish of the cross, reward 
 unto them the joy and glory of the crown. He who hath 
 accounted them worthy of martyrdom, grant unto them the 
 exaltation of the saint. 
 
 And teach us with the eloquent silent lips of these sleeping 
 teachers teach us, standing beside you, to pray for your sake 
 the prayer of the Carpenter of Nazareth, dying in agony upon 
 the cross, praying for those who compassed his death: 
 
 "Father, forgive them; they knew not what they did." 
 
 22 337 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 THE the latter years of his life were devoted 
 to his writing for the press, occasionally lec 
 turing, numerous addresses on occasions of 
 public interest and importance, to a serene 
 and kindly contemplation of life in all its phases, and 
 correspondence with his old friends, which he main 
 tained faithfully up to the time when the pen, as he 
 said, became "so grievous a burden". 
 
 A picture of his life in the last years is given by a 
 newspaper contributor who visited him for the pur 
 poses of a sketch and interview. 
 
 Every inch of space in his study or "den" seems permeated 
 with his radiant personality. Two sides of the room are almost 
 entirely of glass, through which delegates from the sun s rays 
 come in to play pranks with the gleams of wit that emanate 
 from the heart of the man. The walls are covered with photo 
 graphs of famous people, principally old newspaper friends of 
 Mr. Burdette, while bookcases are filled with the works he 
 loves. He says his favorite authors are determined by his 
 moods and by circumstances. Sometimes he is a devoted 
 reader of Charles Lamb, while again Shakespeare, Scott, Thack 
 eray and Dickens hold prominent places in his leisure hours. 
 When asked what humorous works he liked best, the merry, 
 characteristic twinkle invaded his eye as he said, " My favorite 
 works of humor? Why, they are the modern historical novels, 
 and the more seriously they take themselves, the funnier 
 they are." 
 
 Hanging on one of the study doors is a long, narrow parch 
 ment containing a curious Arabian inscription, gotten up for 
 the purpose of warning the devil to keep off the premises. 
 Mr. Burdette secured it when abroad, from an Arab, who assured 
 338 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 him that any man who had such an inscription hung on the 
 walls of his home was immune from any interference of the sub 
 terranean monarch. The student s desk was littered with 
 manuscripts and correspondence, and in the midst of this 
 literary confusion lay the well-worn Bible, the book that nestles 
 closest in the heart of this man s daily life. 
 
 Mr. Burdette always makes his own calendars, and these 
 recording tablets on which the humorist splashes the overflow 
 of effervescent wit would make a unique collection if bound. 
 Three months are usually placed on one card three feet long 
 and one foot wide. Each day is given about a square inch of 
 space, and in these spaces Mr. Burdette keeps a tab on his 
 engagements, usually making some grotesque picture to repre 
 sent that which is to take place. The day set aside for visiting 
 his tailor was designated by a humorous drawing of a suit of 
 clothes with a hat on a pole. The day for the dentist contained 
 a huge molar. The day Mrs. Burdette was elected vice-presi 
 dent of the Federation of Women s Clubs inspired a remarkable 
 work of art, as did the day his son Robert achieved honors at 
 college. 
 
 Four hours and a half of each morning are spent by Mr. 
 Burdette in this den, wrestling over sermons, arranging lectures 
 or attending to correspondence, and if the worker becomes 
 weary, one glance from his windows at the encompassing waves 
 of verdure, and the rugged, deep-cafioned mountains that 
 grandly loom in the distance, gives the needed inspiration, 
 and when the head is again bent over the work, the pen must 
 rush to keep pace with the word music that springs from the 
 heart. Afternoons are set aside for reading, visiting, receiving 
 friends or for working in the garden. 
 
 The beautiful home of Mr. and Mrs. Burdette is an example 
 of domestic possibilities. There is perfect congeniality of 
 temperament, and the strongest sense of comradeship between 
 the two. Mr. Burdette s den is at one end of the hall, his wife s 
 at the other, and during working hours they are incessantly 
 industrious, afterwards criticising each other s work, amending, 
 correcting and suggesting. So readily mutual are they in their 
 work, that on two occasions at Louisville, Ky., and Grand 
 Rapids, Mich. when Mr. Burdette was detained by impossible 
 railway connections, his wife, who had gone on ahead to be 
 
 339 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 ready for such emergencies, took his place on the lecture plat 
 form, and filled his engagements to the satisfaction of his 
 audiences. 
 
 Mrs. Burdette always accompanies her husband on his 
 lecture tours, believing that wherever he is there is her home. 
 She is very practical, and has the reputation among business 
 men of being one of the best business women in California, 
 while on the other hand, her husband is decidedly a dreamer, 
 a veritable "Rainbow Chaser", and his absent-mindedness 
 gives his alert and vigilant little wife hourly employment. At 
 the same time, however, his philosophical tranquility is a 
 cordial for his wife s intensity. 
 
 Mr. Burdette takes unbounded pride in his charming help 
 mate, and when showing guests her immaculate and orderly 
 study, with the well-groomed desk, the chest of drawers for 
 filing away papers, and many other exquisite furnishings typical 
 of femininity, he said, with something suspiciously like a sigh, 
 "She is so systematic. Now she could get up in blackest night 
 and lay her hands on anything, but I always keep my duds in a 
 bag, and it takes me half a day to find what I m after!" 
 
 Mr. Burdette loves being out of doors, and he is never so 
 happy as when, garbed in overalls, wide hat and stout boots, 
 he works among his flowers. He declares that "houses are 
 only fit to eat and sleep in anyway". Just for recreation this 
 summer, he and his son Roy built a stone wall 300 feet in length 
 around one of the rose gardens, mixing the mortar, lugging the 
 stones and carrying the hod all by themselves, and when the 
 work was finished, a stone tablet bearing the inscription " Pater 
 Filiusque Soli Fecerunt" (father and son alone made it), was 
 set in the wall. Speaking of his preparations for this outdoor 
 gymnasium, as Mr. Burdette called this masonry work, he 
 said laughingly, " Why, we didn t know the meaning of mortar 
 and cement, let alone mixing the stuff, and we had to go to the 
 dictionary to find out." 
 
 The first little home in Peoria had been one of 
 struggle and suffering. The home in Burlington 
 had sheltered continued suffering, accompanied with 
 something of success,and was well named/ Heartsease . 
 340 
 
MR. BURDETTE IN~HIS"GARDEN AT "SUNNYCREST 1 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 "Doubting Castle" at Ardmore had been a tent in the 
 wilderness, as it were, and " Robin s Nest" at Bryn 
 Mawr had been a refuge from the weariness and vicis 
 situdes of lecture travel up and down the land. "Sun- 
 nycrest, " his California home, was established when he 
 came to live among its roses, its birds and its sunsets, all 
 of which appealed to his poetical temperament, com 
 forted and made joyous his latter years. 
 
 " Shadow of mountain and smile of the sea, 
 
 Orange grove vistas that dimple between; 
 Ripple of mocking-bird minstrelsy, 
 
 Glint of the starlight s silvery sheen; 
 Beauty and perfume of lily and rose, 
 
 Grace of the springtime the glad year through; 
 Eastward the sunset its glory throws 
 
 "Sunny crest" kisses a greeting to you!" 
 
 The morning of the 25th of March, 1909, while 
 preparations were being made for a large reception, 
 afternoon and evening, on the tenth wedding anniver 
 sary, Mr. Burdette slipped on the damp porch, receiving 
 an injury which at the time seemed slight, but which 
 soon developed into a serious condition. Courageous 
 and uncomplaining, he passed through the day with 
 what we afterward realized must have been great 
 suffering, and except that he was unable to get up and 
 down when the night came, he had made no demonstra 
 tion of how seriously his back was hurt. Medical aid 
 was summoned during the following days, and relief to 
 some extent was offered. Having a long standing 
 engagement to speak at New York at the Associated 
 Press Banquet, we started for the East in April. 
 Before twenty-four hours on the train it was evident 
 that the wisdom of the trip ought to have been ques 
 tioned. The stay in New York was a brief one, and the 
 
 341 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 fulfilment of the engagement was not entirely satis 
 factory, due to his physical condition. However, this 
 was said of it: 
 
 The banquet, which was held at the Waldorf-Astoria, with 
 700 members present, was addressed by Hon. Rufus Choate, 
 Ambassador from England, the German Ambassador, Senator 
 Patterson of Colorado and Robert J. Burdette. 
 
 Mr. Burdette s speech was the personification of wit and 
 humor from beginning to end and was made emphatic and 
 unique by Burdette s peculiar voice and accent all of which 
 combined to convulse the audience at the end of every sentence. 
 
 In the course of his address Mr. Burdette said: 
 
 If a man would publish a newspaper called " Blue Pencil- 
 lings", made up exclusively of the things all the other papers 
 in the town shut out, he would have a circulation equal to the 
 United States Navy which has been around the world and is 
 starting back again. But it would only last a day. The 
 editor wouldn t last quite so long. The publisher would last 
 oh, maybe ten or fifteen years with a reduction of time for 
 good behaviour and a chance for a pardon or maybe a mis 
 trial. But it would be worth getting shot for, if a man doesn t 
 mind being shot. 
 
 The publishers have given us better newspapers in this 
 twentieth century than the world ever knew before our day. 
 If it were possible to attain to any sort of perfection in any 
 business, it would seem that we must have reached perfection 
 in the art of news-gathering. But somewhat we have sacrificed, 
 as we have in all lines of business. 
 
 We are more capable, more daring, more progressive, more 
 successful, more purposeful I wonder if men are quite so 
 lovable if our friendships, in this life of stress, are quite so 
 manly and tender and loyal? You see, between man and man, 
 or man and woman, it isn t an easy thing to make love in a six 
 cylinder automobile hitting the high places at sixty miles per. 
 That s a ride for the nerves. The heart prefers a one-horse 
 buggy, with winding road that leads nowhere, a horse that is 
 given to meditation and a jog-trot; the whip in the socket, 
 342 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 and the lines wrapped around your leg, and your arms wrapped 
 oh, pshaw, what s the use? 
 
 Times have changed and we must play the game under the 
 new rules. Go ahead and "get out the paper". I believe in 
 today. I am an optimist of the class represented by the man 
 who fell out of the dormer window of a twenty-five-story sky 
 scraper. He counted the windows as he shot downward, until 
 he passed the third floor. Then he chortled joyously, "Well, 
 I am all right thus far". 
 
 With some difficulty, and a rest in Chicago, we 
 returned to the Coast, where, in a few days, an unfor 
 tunate, serious, brief attack of illness on my part seemed 
 to force him to forget his own physical condition so that 
 he continued with his work. In June we determined to 
 go to our summer cottage at Clifton-by-the-Sea, and 
 while a trained nurse was sent with me, the next morn 
 ing after arriving Mr. Burdette found it impossible to 
 stand, and that nurse became his constant attendant 
 for the next four months. So serious was his condition 
 that the Associated Press gave out bulletins of his 
 condition, and that brought in return as an expression 
 of his friends from all over the United States, hundreds 
 of letters which gave definite evidence of the hold he 
 had upon the public heart. 
 
 And this from one of the rank and file: 
 
 As one of Pasadena s ordinary men in the humbler walks 
 of life, I would very much wish to mingle my words of heartfelt 
 sympathy with them for you just at this time; though one feels 
 entirely helpless and the only thing that can be done is with 
 word or pen. I have never looked upon Niagara Falls or seen 
 the big trees of California; but; I have heard your voice in 
 sermon and in prayer and anecdote revealing those great personal 
 powers and charms that you so eminently possess, and I have 
 seen that intensely pleasant smile, lighting up men s hearts 
 and furnishing them with a God speed to better things. May 
 the best the Lord can give be yours. 
 
 343 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 As it became evident that he would probably never 
 be able to assume his duties as Pastor again, the Temple 
 Baptist Church was asked to seek some one to fill the 
 place which he must vacate. Grief at the thought of 
 this was most sincere, and almost unreconcilable in 
 many cases, but we counselled them that possibly he 
 had done his work and that the time had come when 
 Temple Church needed directions along different lines. 
 But the out-pouring of their love to him at that time 
 was such as rarely comes to men before they have passed 
 beyond the consciousness of such expressions. 
 
 The resolutions passed by Temple Church most 
 earnestly expressed the attitude of his "flock", espe 
 cially the section which reads: 
 
 Resolved, That Temple Church can best honor God and 
 cherish the memory of Dr. Burdette as pastor and leader by 
 making our position in Christian service, attained under his 
 loving leadership, a stepping stone to a loftier and broader 
 plane of Christian usefulness. 
 
 He accepted the illness which followed his injury 
 in 1909 with resignation, patience, and an unfailing 
 belief in the value of the chastened spirit. Indeed, in 
 the following year one of his most effective letters to the 
 Sunday School Times dealt with his view of the value 
 of sickness and trouble. It was entitled, "Why I 
 Believe in Sickness and Trouble/ and in that he set 
 forth his belief in this wise: 
 
 Not because I want to, but because I have to. Because 
 I believe in quinine, which isn t half so sweet as sugar, but is a 
 much better febrifuge. Because I don t believe that an athlete 
 can train for a Marathon race on ice cream soda and fudge. 
 Because I don t believe that pickle and cake are good muscle- 
 builders for the tennis and basket ball girl. Because I believe 
 that the greatest victory of the Revolutionary War was Valley 
 Forge. 
 
 344 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 I believe in the strengthening discipline of sickness and 
 trouble because men don t go into a rose garden to look for 
 ship timber. I believe that Napoleon was defeated by his 
 succession of victories, while Washington was victorious through 
 his many defeats. Because I believe that America was dis 
 covered while a starving navigator was being turned away 
 from palace doors under the smarting scourge of scientific 
 geographers. Because I believe a man who never had an ache 
 never had a pleasure. 
 
 Because a horse that is allowed to feed himself from the 
 bin and have the run of the pasture never wins the race. Be 
 cause I believe in the old Arab proverb, "All sunshine makes 
 the desert". Because a snow-fed river lasts through the sum 
 mer drouth. Because Jacob saw a vision that all the world 
 still looks at when his head was pillowed on a stone in the 
 desert. Because David learned to govern Israel in the cave 
 of Adullam, and Joseph learned high statecraft in an Egyptian 
 prison. Because people who get everything they want and get 
 it easy, die crying for the moon. 
 
 Because I believe in this world. I also believe in the 
 spiritual world, but that isn t the one in which we live. And 
 in this "world ye shall have tribulation". 
 
 Life at the street level and life in the altitudes are very 
 different. The weather man gave the official temperature of 
 yesterday afternoon, at the hour I was carried into the hospital, 
 unconscious from heat-stroke, as only eighty-nine degrees. 
 But that was up on the roof of a twenty-story building, under 
 the shadow of a protecting canopy, where the air was clean and 
 pure and sweet, even if it was a little warm. 
 
 Down where I was at work, laying an asphalt pavement, 
 the hot sun flamed down on the back of my head till my brain 
 seethed. The reflected heat glared up from the paving stones 
 into my face till my eyes went blind. I breathed the hot, 
 foul-smelling dust stirred up by the feet of a thousand horses 
 and the poisonous exhalations from an opened sewer. That s 
 how hot it really was. A hundred and three in the shade and 
 no shade. I tell you, Pilgrims, we don t live up in the breezy 
 observatory of the weather man. We work down in the street, 
 and we live in a tenement. 
 
 I do not believe one little bit in the fundamental doctrine 
 of certain or rather, very uncertain religious societies and 
 
 345 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 schools of art, that " Whatever is, isn t ", and conversely, 
 "Whatever isn t is". 
 
 I believe in the reality of the world into which I was born 
 and in which I live, as firmly as I know I was born. I believe 
 the material world is as real as the eternal world while it 
 lasts. I don t believe that God gave me eyes just to play a 
 joke on a poor finite creature, taking infinite pleasure in watch 
 ing me see things wrong all my life. 
 
 I don t believe the Creator, who can make things right 
 just as easily as he can make them wrong, gave me sensations 
 which make the roaring of my bones fill the long night with 
 aches and pains, that he might laugh with his smiling angels 
 at the poor fool of a man who thought he was sick when they 
 all knew very well there was nothing the matter with him. 
 
 I don t believe he painted an air-drawn picture of a world 
 on a canvas of nothing, that he might amuse himself watching 
 me pant up the non-existent steeps and fall into the uncreated 
 depths, crying for childish fear in the imaginary darkness, and 
 laughing with equally foolish joy at the unsubstantial dream of 
 fabulous sunlight. 
 
 I could have no confidence in such a Providence. How 
 could we ask him for bread, when there would be the haunting 
 fear that he might give us a stone, just because our senses of 
 sight and taste which he had given us were so misleading that 
 we couldn t tell one from the other anyhow? To give his 
 children deceiving senses would be the brutality of a heartless 
 man who frightens little children with a broom-and-sheet ghost. 
 
 That we do have some imaginary troubles and sicknesses, 
 everybody knows. But these are easily cured by imaginary 
 medicines and imaginary treatment, and can be avoided by 
 imaginary preventives. 
 
 But sorrow in the soul of a man today is as real as was 
 the agony in Gethsemane. The fire of human anguish is now 
 as real as the suffering that made Job curse the day of his birth, 
 and smote his sympathizing friends dumb with heartache. 
 "The flesh still quivers when the pincers tear, the blood will 
 follow where the knife is driven." Pain is real as pleasure. 
 Sorrow is absolute as joy. If we would see the crown, we 
 must look at the Cross which it enwreathes as a halo. Anguish 
 made sweet by Love. Pain endured and conquered. Suffering 
 346 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 made Holy. Peace acquired through affliction. Human 
 courage crowned by Divine compassion. And always, the 
 Human as real as the Divine. 
 
 There is no virtue in mere suffering. There is no goodness 
 inherent in pain. Had there been nothing on the Cross but 
 the human figure of the Son of God, writhing in mortal agony, 
 the spectacle had been repulsive. The submission to the 
 reality of the cross was its glory. The endurance of actual 
 bodily pain, positive anguish of mind and soul this set the 
 brilliants, out-shining the stars, in the crown of victory. 
 
 For the crown is for a victor. And a victory over nothing 
 is crowned with the shadow of a shadow. A triumph over 
 imaginary foes wins but an imaginary crown. 
 
 "Why are afflictions sent upon the people of God?" That 
 is one of the easy questions. I don t know. And yet I reckon 
 I know as much about it as anybody. I don t know, for that 
 matter, why afflictions are also sent upon wicked people. I 
 don t know why innocent children suffer for the sins of their 
 parents. But they do. I don t know why Abraham Lincoln 
 was assassinated by an actor, vanity-inflated with overwhelming 
 sense of his own importance. I don t know why Socrates was 
 poisoned while his judges remained in office. 
 
 I don t know why Jesus Christ was crucified while Pilate 
 sat on the judgment seat and Herod continued to pollute a 
 throne with iniquities. I don t know why, for three hundred 
 years, God s people, sheep of his hand and people of his pasture, 
 walked on burning plowshares under skies of brass, while 
 storms of persecution rained upon them in every form of 
 horrible torture and fearful death. 
 
 But I do know that that is the way the church conquered 
 the world for Christ. I do know that not one god of its perse 
 cutors is left in the world today, save as a broken fragment in 
 a temple of dust. 
 
 What do I know about pain, and sorrow, and trouble? 
 I know only what everybody knows I know what has grown 
 out of the heart-soil scarred by the plow and torn by the harrow. 
 I look at the receding storm and I see the splendor of the rain 
 bow. I go into the depths of a murky swamp, and say, "A 
 nest of pestilential fevers". Lo, at my feet the delicate beauty 
 of an orchid. I catch the perfume of the sandal- wood on the 
 
 347 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 edge of the axe. I hear the axes ringing in the forest of Lebanon, 
 and I say, "Death and destruction!" Lo, the fragrance of the 
 carven beams in the temple. For it is the cedar that we call 
 dead the tree felled and wrought into shapes of grace and use 
 of worship, not the living cedar in the forest that gives forth 
 its incense of praise. 
 
 I search the world over, all its continents, islands and seas, 
 for the sweetest, tenderest, holiest spot it holds, and I kneel 
 beneath the gnarled olives of dark Gethsemane. My soul is 
 made stronger, my thoughts purer, my life nobler, by its agony 
 of renunciation. I look upon the cross of shame a Roman 
 instrument of torture and humiliation. Lo, it shines above 
 every crown in the world, it glows with a radiance more endur 
 ing than the sun throughout the length and breadth of civiliza 
 tion an emblem of authority, by which princes reign! It 
 gleams in the splendor of heaven above the dome of the uni 
 verse. It glorifies everything that it shines upon. 
 
 The contemptuous phrase of a Roman governor, a brutal 
 sneer at the prisoner whom he feared, and a taunt to exasperate 
 the Jews whom he despised "Jesus of Nazareth, King" 
 endures forever. Angels echo it in anthems of exaltation, and 
 "the great multitude, which no man could number", and 
 "every created thing which is in the heaven, and on the earth, 
 and under the earth, and on the sea", with one mighty voice 
 catch up the scoff of Pilate, and with it ascribe "the blessing, 
 and the honor, and the glory, and the dominion, for ever and 
 ever", unto the Lamb which was slain. 
 
 Not unto him who put the cup aside at Gethsemane. Not 
 unto him who came down from the cross and saved himself. 
 But unto him who suffered ; who endured the cross unto him 
 who was slain. 
 
 Ah, this old desire to make things easy, to smooth away 
 all the difficulties, to evade all the burdens, to make the way 
 to heaven down hill and sunny weather it is a sin as old as the 
 race of man. It began in Eden when the tempter said, "Pick 
 out the easy things and the smooth path. Take only what 
 looks good to yourself; reach out after what is a delight to the 
 eyes and is desirable to look upon." "Command that these 
 stones become bread", was the later form of the same 
 temptation. 
 
 348 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 And once again it presented itself in the hour of human 
 suffering and weakness, of faintness from pain and hunger and 
 thirst " and when they were come unto a place called Golgotha, 
 they gave him wine to drink mingled with gall; and when he 
 had tasted it, he would not drink." It was a drug; it would 
 stupefy his senses; it would render pain an illusion; it would 
 make the sacrifice easy. And when he knew what it was, " He 
 would not drink". 
 
 There are teachers today who say to us: "Shut your eyes 
 to everything harsh and disagreeable, and if you can t see it, 
 it isn t there. Try our great Ostrich Remedy for all the ills 
 to which human flesh is heir. Stick your head in the sand, 
 and you can t see the lion coming." 
 
 The lion is there, just the same, and if you ll stay right 
 where you are and keep your head in the sand a little longer, 
 there will be less ostrich and more lion on the landscape. 
 
 What do I know about afflictions? I know only what 
 everybody else knows that they are guide-posts along the 
 way of the Pilgrimage. If the pathway lies through struggle 
 and pains and fears, patience and love, and foes and fightings, 
 you re pretty sure to be on the right road. What is this mighty 
 "sea of troubles"? That s the Red Sea. Go right ahead and 
 see the glory of God. This is death in the desert? Speak to 
 the rock, a-quiver with the heat glimmer, and see the fountains 
 of life burst forth. That? That s a king wailing the sorrow 
 of a broken heart in the chamber over the gate. You re on the 
 right way. These? A long line of prison "finger-posts" 
 Peter and John and Paul and Silas lots of prisons on the right 
 road. This? A storm on Galilee. Good many storms on the 
 "Jesus Way". This headless body? John the Baptist. That one? 
 Paul. This shadowy garden where the starlight gleams softly 
 on the crimson dew of agony falling on the grass blades? Geth- 
 semane. You have to pass through Gethsemane. This fearful 
 hill? Calvary. This burst of glory and splendor of life and joy? 
 
 Oh, Pilgrim, this is Easter morn! You ve come the right 
 way, and you re Home, Pilgrim, you re Home! 
 
 Now, suppose you had avoided all this? Turned back to 
 Egypt? Worshiped Diana, and kept out of prison? Made a 
 little money by the sale of your Christ, like Judas? Gone 
 around Gethsemane? Bowed to Pilate and avoided the Cross? 
 
 349 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Later, writing to his sister, in October, 1909, he 
 said: 
 
 This is October 14th. Yesterday we went to Pasadena to 
 see President Taft go by. I saw him. I don t think he recog 
 nized me, although we used to be neighbors of the Tafts in 
 Cincinnati. But I have grown this mustache since then and 
 that has changed me a little. And beside, I don t think he was 
 born when we lived there. That might affect his recollection 
 of me somewhat. I saw him about a tenth of a second, while 
 his automobile was breaking the speed limit on Orange Grove 
 Avenue. Then I came back to this blessed little bungalow by 
 the restful sea. The Pacific Ocean never hurries. It is rest 
 less, but it takes its time. The surf never beats in rag-time. 
 
 The year previous, Mr. Trumbull of the Sunday 
 School Times had asked Mr. Burdette for a series of 
 lesson expositions and chapters on Civil War reminis 
 cences, and his letters to Mr. Trumbull show his later 
 epistolary vivacity and humor: 
 
 MY DEAR BOY, 
 
 Just after I dropped my lesson into the fire-box came your 
 letter asking me to put in more paragraphs. I will. Next 
 time. As Bill Nye says about the ship that went down in 
 October; "We did not hear about it until the following spring; 
 and then it was too late." 
 
 What a son of your father you are! Your birth-right is his 
 great big Loving Heart. It was tender as a woman s, and as 
 strong as a gladiator s. I think the reason why he loved help 
 less and weak people so much was just because he could help 
 them. You have his way of saying encouraging things in just 
 the right way, at just the right time, and to the very right man. 
 It is a splendid endowment, to have the right kind of a father 
 isn t it? And somehow, you know, I kindo, sorto give the 
 Boy a little credit for some of it? I think the father does, too. 
 
 The Sunday School Times also published his volume 
 of verses, "The Silver Trumpets ", of which he tells in 
 this letter: 
 350 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 PASADENA, July 4th. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND TRUMBULL: 
 
 Just see how I kept the "Fourth" safe and sane! Mrs. 
 Burdette and I sent all the servants away; disconnected the 
 telephone, muffled the door bell, lunched on bread and butter 
 and supped on bread and milk and lo, a whole, long, blessed 
 day without an interruption a day of work. That was the 
 kind of a day they had in the garden of Eden a day of work 
 from sunrise to sunset. 
 
 The first "interruption" caused the fall of man. 
 
 From that day to this, it has been the same way. Work 
 is a joy; a blessing; it prolongs life, preserves the health, keeps 
 the teeth white, and inclines the hair to curl. It s the "inter 
 ruptions" of life that are the inventions of the evil one. 
 
 Well; I send you the results of a quiet day. 
 
 You must know, these poems I have to call them some 
 thing were written as a Christmas present to Mrs. Burdette. 
 " What shall I give you this Christmas? " I asked her. I have 
 to ask my friends what they want, because my brain is very 
 narrow and shallow. For many years I have bought hat-pins 
 for women and base balls for men I can think of no greater 
 variety of Christmas remembrances. My Lady said she wanted 
 a poem on the first page of the Temple Herald (our church 
 calendar) every Sunday throughout the year. And here they 
 are, 52 fifty-two count them fifty-two 52. 
 
 They were written as preludes to the morning sermons, 
 being based upon the text thereof. Each one of them was 
 accompanied by an illustration a picture I found somewhere 
 that fitted the subject, and you may note traces here and there 
 of a slightly veiled allusion to some pictorial illustration. 
 
 Anyhow; here they are. I have called the collection by 
 forty-two different titles, and out of the forty-two I have 
 selected for the name "The Silver Trumpets." 
 
 I think now any of the other thirty-nine are better than 
 this one. But I can t guess which one is better than all the 
 thirty-eight. Ah me! A baby s troubles begin with its name. 
 But, like many good people, I wanted a Bible name for my 
 baby, so when I read in Numbers 10, 2: " Make thee two trum 
 pets of silver that thou mayest use them for the calling of the 
 assembly and for the journeying of the camps," I bethought 
 
 351 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 me that these little blasts or flourishes on my little tin trumpet 
 set the Assembly at our great Temple in the order of worship, 
 and gave the signal for the journey of the week. Hence the 
 final selection of a name. What a long explanation for a little 
 name for a small baby! I will embody it in the "Foreword". 
 It must have been a foreword, mustn t it? 
 
 Well, take the baby and dandle it; guess how much it 
 weighs? Who does it look like? I have had great happiness 
 in the borning of the Fiftytwoplets. I would like to see the 
 darling in a pretty dress I am no Quaker but not a hobble, 
 please. I would like the copyright in my own name that s 
 Daddy s carnal pride. 
 
 Cordially yours, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 When the copy for his Sunday School Times articles 
 with reference to the war were being prepared for publi 
 cation, some editing was done in the office that called 
 forth a letter from Mr. Burdette in which he said: 
 
 All my life I have pushed the "Lights" to the front in my 
 work, and have used the "Shadows" merely as backgrounds to 
 emphasize the light, and I don t know that I can keep up a 
 pathetic series of chapters. Dear Man, I have to preach short 
 sermons and make short prayers, lest my heart should break 
 into laughter and scandalize a congregation which may not 
 realize what a joyous thing religion is to me. 
 
 And when the series was ready for publication, he 
 sent this note: 
 
 As to the title for the entire series well, you know what 
 Gen. Sherman said war was? Or, rather, is? Well, " Through 
 Hell to Heaven" that is coming home, is the most striking 
 title I can think of. If your blessed old Cromwellian father 
 were in command, I could see him shake his head with a for 
 giving smile on his face. But I ve picked out something else, 
 not quite so harsh. So our ship is christened with a bottle of 
 ink, and you may knock away the stays and launch her when 
 you please. 
 352 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 He did occasional work for the Ladies Home Journal, 
 whose editor, Mr. Edward W. Bok, he had known well 
 in Pennsylvania days. Writing to him toward the 
 close of his life work he said: 
 
 And you don t know how delighted I am to get back to the 
 magazine. At my age one should be past such a feeling, but 
 I was as proud and happy when you accepted "One Chair in 
 My Pulpit" as I was ages ago when you printed the first num 
 ber of "From a New Ink Stand". Just as proud, and that 
 new ink stand spilled its first quill full across the pages of the 
 Journal away back in the early 90 s, when you were up at old 
 435 Arch Street. What ancient history! 
 
 After months of suffering, a physician administered 
 to him who gave him relief and quickly health began to 
 be restored. 
 
 With his physical recovery, his mentality became 
 alert and active and in its old form, as shown by a talk 
 he gave December 6, 1909, before the Church Fed 
 eration meeting held in Temple Auditorium, on 
 " Church Unity", which carried so much of his philoso 
 phy. He said in part: 
 
 We have been talking about church union for years. And 
 the great opposition to it has largely come from little fellows 
 who, because they can t swim, are afraid they will be swallowed 
 out of sight in the great ocean of Christian union and harmony. 
 They need not be afraid. They ll float. No matter if the 
 churches come together in a maelstrom, the apples and corks 
 will go bobbing around on the surface, down in the deepest 
 hollows and capping the stormiest crests of the shouting billows. 
 
 There are some people who never quite rejoice with the 
 rest of us because they are too heavy to fly and too light to sink. 
 So they never know the ecstasy of the upper ether, between 
 the earth and the stars, nor the profound depths into which 
 the soul goes down sometimes, to find itself alone with God. 
 
 The union of the churches ? The unity of the Spirit? The 
 unity of the faith? Are we waiting for it? I m sorry for the 
 
 23 353 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 man who is. Are we ready for it? I m just as sorry for the 
 man who isn t. They re both out of place and time. 
 
 Do we wait, then, while we pray and hope for the unity of 
 the church in the spirit of Jesus Christ, our one Lord? Why, 
 men and brethren, it s here! What do I care for the denomina 
 tional badge on the collar of a man s coat, when finding me 
 sore beset by those robbers, pain and poverty, and sickness, 
 and he stops, after ordained priest and consecrated Levite 
 have gone by, to pour oil into my smarting wounds, wrap his 
 own cloak about me, wind his arms around me to lift me up, 
 while he says to the commercialism of the world, " Take care, 
 good care of him; I ll pay you." Unity of the churches? I 
 don t care for the name. I bless God for the fact. 
 
 Though his health improved so that in January of 
 1910 he was able to take a trip to Honolulu, where he 
 remained for some months under the beneficial condi 
 tions there, and continued his trip to Japan and China, 
 there was never any time after this when he felt for one 
 moment he could have carried the burdens of Temple 
 Baptist Church or of any continuous work. 
 
 After his return to California in the summer of 1910, 
 he occasionally preached in the pulpits of the Presby 
 terian church of Pasadena, the Congregational Church 
 of Los Angeles, the Presbyterian Church of Los Angeles, 
 the various Baptist churches and supplied a summer in 
 the Temple Baptist Church, but was unequal to any 
 heavier demands. 
 
 But that he did make an occasional address, is shown 
 by the record that at a Memorial Service for the 
 Titanic s dead, Mr. Burdette speaking for "The Army" 
 paid this tribute to Archibald Butt: 
 
 So this Soldier, being in the place of the Sacrifice, repre 
 sented the army in its best and noblest service. His sword was 
 sheathed; his arms were strong with gentleness. The more 
 fragile the life in peril, the more tenderly was it guarded. 
 
 354 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 Who shall measure what God has purchased at the price of 
 this soldier s life? 
 
 Whether it bought much or little, or nothing, the Sacrifice 
 never questioned. To the soldier, the path of duty lay before 
 him, plain as the stars in heaven above him. It was not one 
 of two things which he might do it was the one supreme thing 
 which he must do. "Noblesse oblige." 
 
 In the camera of the darkness of that April morning love 
 caught and forever holds for us a picture of the man who stood 
 for the American army in that hour of fear and death. 
 
 We see him standing with his hand on the shoulder of a 
 friend. His was a loving nature a friend till death. He looked 
 after the departing boats with longing glances, as a man who 
 looked at heaven with level eyes and saw God in the faces of 
 his friends. From the doomed wreck he looked down at the 
 scattered squadron of lifeboats. Some of them weakly rowed 
 by sobbing women women with husbands, sons, lovers on the 
 ship of death. 
 
 They were but a little way off. There was yet time for a 
 leap to life and safety. The ship careened to its last plunge 
 down into the black dungeons of its pitiless enemy, the sea. 
 The soldier glanced around the scattered lifeboats as the 
 adjutant glances along the line of glittering bayonets in the 
 quiet hour of the evening parade. They are all there the 
 weak, the helpless, the women, and the children. The soldier 
 turned and faced his Great Commander, saluted and reported: 
 
 "Sir, the parade is formed!" 
 
 "To your post!" 
 
 And with the old soldierly bearing and the firm, martial 
 tread, he passed through the portals of darkness into the land 
 of glory, to take his place among the immortals who have died 
 for men. And the smile that lingered to the last of earth upon 
 his face carried its sunshine into the sea. 
 
 In 1912 a trip was planned to Europe for the benefit 
 of my health, and in May we left New York for Europe, 
 intending to have a brief automobile trip through 
 England, going to Paris and Bad Nauheim. As this 
 trip was on account of my health, we found before 
 
 355 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 reaching London that it would be better to go to Bad 
 Nauheim at once. We landed at Cherbourg, going up 
 to Paris and thence to Bad Nauheim, where we both 
 took the baths, which Mr. Burdette declared on his 
 part were entirely for my benefit. 
 
 In a letter to his sister Jo, written from Bad Nau 
 heim, he says: 
 
 It is not an exciting life but it fills up the time. When we 
 are not dressing for something we are undressing because we 
 have just had it. We wear our clothes out in the dressing room 
 before we have a chance to show them on the street. 
 
 We celebrated my birthday Number 68, count them by 
 spending the day in a place that again would have interested 
 Gus mightily. It is the oldest Roman camp in the world the 
 only one that has ever been wholly restored and reconstructed 
 along the lines of its old ruins. The Kaiser had this work done. 
 It was a camp for permanent occupation, splendidly fortified, 
 with fine buildings for the quarters of the officers and soldiers, 
 and for the offices of the civil administration. The museums 
 are rich in the relics of weapons, jewelry and utensils of all 
 sorts that have been dug up here. It was made here when the 
 Romans were trying to extend and hold their empire over the 
 Germans, away back when, as we learned at school, "Omnia 
 Gallia in tres partes divisa" wast. 
 
 The ancient batteries of catapults and machines for throw 
 ing huge javelins are reconstructed, giving the camp a singu 
 larly and most impressive sense of reality. It would not have 
 surprised me much if a helmeted Roman sentinel had halted 
 me with a "Quo Vadis?" If he had I would have said, "Oh 
 ho? You are one of the beggars who arranged that twenty-six 
 prepositions shall be followed by the accusative? You are the 
 pelican I ve been laying for/ 
 
 And I would have had one round with him anyhow just to 
 avenge my bitter boyhood on Andrews and Stoddard s Latin 
 Grammar. 
 
 We were in Europe with two friends, Dr. and Mrs. 
 Merrifield, when his 68th birthday was celebrated at 
 
 356 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE WITH MR. KENNEDY OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 
 AND MR. K. ITO, PROPRIETOR OF THE MANCHURIAN DAILY 
 NEWS AT DAIREN 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 Bad Nauheim, and Dr. Merrifield wrote him this 
 appreciation: 
 
 You are 68 "years young" to-day the youngest oldster I 
 have ever known. I little dreamed, back on the Vermont farm 
 forty years or more ago when I first came to admire you 
 through your Hawkeye articles, copied each week into the 
 Vermont Phoenix and so brought regularly to our home and 
 hearts that I should ever be privileged to be numbered among 
 your personal friends. But so it is; and to-day I bring to you 
 my heart s homage, grateful that the pen which charmed at 
 morn still charms at eve. Did your countless hosts of admirers, 
 scattered all over the American Continent, know that to-day 
 is the 68th anniversary of the birth of genial "Bob" Burdette, 
 who has delighted millions of hearts with his kindly humor and 
 never wounded one, they would join with me in heartfelt 
 greetings and in the expressed hope that the pen and tongue 
 which have charmed a continent for forty years may retain 
 undiminished their magic power for many years to come. 
 
 With affectionate admiration and "many happy returns", 
 may I claim the high privilege of subscribing myself 
 
 Your friend, 
 
 WEBSTER MERRIFIELD. 
 
 Not receiving all the benefit I had hoped, we later 
 went to Switzerland and from there to Baden Baden 
 where I was definitely improved in health. Mr. Bur 
 dette at this time, seemingly so well, had devoted him 
 self to the pleasure of the place and writing rather than 
 taking the baths. On our way home, before reaching 
 New York, it became apparent that he was not as well 
 as he had thought, and my regret was often expressed 
 that he had not joined me in the cure at Baden Baden. 
 
 His strength was not sufficient for the abundant 
 tasks he had been able to perform in all the years of his 
 active life up to that time. On many days it was not 
 possible for him to leave the home, and he found, 
 
 357 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 apparently, consolation in his diary, which was more 
 faithfully kept in the time following the beginning of 
 his illness than at any other previous time in his life. 
 There are entries early in 1913 that indicate the begin 
 ning of the break in his health. On February 13th of 
 that year there is an entry: 
 
 R. (as he designates himself) is very weak today, and suffer 
 ing much from his intestinal derangement. He ate no supper 
 and went to bed at curfew. 
 
 And on the following morning: 
 
 R. got up feeling very weak, and when he tried to work, 
 only puttered. 
 
 These were, however, occasional evidences of the 
 onset of disease, and there were intermittent periods of 
 strength and the old ability to work, for on Sunday, 
 February 23d, he preached from his old pulpit in the 
 "Temple", before an overflowing congregation, more 
 than five hundred persons being turned away. 
 
 From that time on he worked less and he began 
 more and more to realize he was an invalid, and though 
 he occasionally did public work, it was with great 
 expenditure of effort. 
 
 On Sunday, March 2, 1913, he preached again in 
 the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, the first pulpit he 
 occupied after entering the active ministry. His sermon 
 was on "Infinite Love" and made a deep impression, 
 as it seemed he was reciting his testing experience. 
 This was the last time he preached in the church and 
 his diary indicated that he preached to "standing 
 room ". But he says further, " I was not at all well and 
 my voice was weak but I pulled through all right. 
 This is the last sermon this month." 
 
 He attended the 25th Anniversary dinner of the 
 358 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 Pasadena Board of Trade in April, as one of the guest 
 of honor and speakers, and observes that 
 
 He got along very well, but he sure was tired and weak, and 
 it was a pull up hill through the sand all the way. 
 
 He very much enjoyed his companionship with 
 Henry Van Dyke, who visited Sunnycrest that winter, 
 and he notes with pleasure the attendance upon delight 
 ful dinners given in Dr. Van Dyke s honor. 
 
 Daily life became for him less active, his preaching 
 and lecturing more occasional, the afternoon "siesta" 
 an institution, the hours of his morning work shorter, 
 and reading and music the greatest of his delights. 
 "Curfew", as he always indicated his bed time, was 
 early, and sleep came to be wooed with greater diffi 
 culty. An entry in his diary in March reads: 
 
 R. feels miserable these days 24 hours a day. 
 Later in March there is this entry: 
 
 Saw Dr. who put me on rigid regimen and sentenced me to 
 bed for three days. 
 
 He maintained, however, his interest in civic and 
 public affairs, and in referring to a municipal election 
 in April, and the defeat of a candidate, he says: 
 
 7000 persons registered who did not vote. Do you suppose 
 I would have been defeated by 100 votes with 7000 lying 
 around to be picked up? That is not the kind of politics I was 
 trained up in. It is all right for the office to seek the man, 
 but I observe that it usually seeks the man who chases it into 
 a corner and throttles it into accepting him. 
 
 In May he was so far improved that he lectured at 
 Reno, and delivered the baccalaureate sermon at the 
 University of Nevada on "Under Sealed Orders". All 
 of his old eloquence and power of expression were in evi- 
 
 359 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 dence, but in addition there seemed a quality more 
 accentuated than ever before, the fervor of a man 
 delivering a message under Divine guidance. 
 
 Returning by the way of San Francisco he gave the 
 baccalaureate sermon for Stanford University, May 
 18th, and on May 30th, he preached the Memorial Day 
 sermon to the Grand Army of the Republic, at Temple 
 Auditorium, Los Angeles. June 8th, he gave a sermon 
 before the religious associations of the University of 
 Redlands, on " Beauty and Strength". 
 
 In June, 1889, he preached his first baccalaureate 
 sermon before the Class of 89, at the State Normal 
 School, West Chester, Pa. so almost a quarter of a 
 century had intervened between the first and the last, 
 when on June 12, 1913, he gave his last public utterance, 
 which was a commencement address before three hun 
 dred graduates of the University of Southern California, 
 on "God s Country". Following this, we went for a 
 trip to the Yosemite, which filled several weeks of the 
 early summer and gave him great pleasure. This was 
 destined to be his last long trip away from Pasadena. 
 
 In July, his diary notes that "his stomach is revo 
 lutionary again". 
 
 Upon our return from Yosemite, we went to our 
 summer cottage at Clifton-by-the-Sea, where he spent 
 the days of more or less invalidism writing to his friends, 
 and occasionally contributing to the magazines and 
 papers. In a letter to a friend, he writes: 
 
 We are running on the usual schedule down at Eventide. 
 I have lost my batting streak and my weight has dwindled 
 to 127. I have placed myself in the hands of Dr. Millspaugh, 
 of Los Angeles, who is recommended to me as a leading special 
 ist in stomach troubles, and he certainly is finding out all about 
 me. I am as weak as water, but I strongly hope that I will 
 soon strike the upgrade again, 
 360 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 Clara is buoyant and radiant and happy as a school girl, 
 in spite of being burdened with a sick old husband. She gives 
 most of her strength, all of her time and more of her thought 
 to me. God bless her! These afternoon days would be all 
 November but for her care. 
 
 The Pacific was always a delight to him, and a July 
 notation reads: 
 
 The gulls have been unusually numerous all day, and the 
 fishing has been fine for men and birds. Little steam and gaso 
 line launches and fleets of row boats have dotted the blue sea, 
 and many have been the broken circles of water which drew 
 the screaming birds by scores and attracted the boats as well. 
 All this told of a general banquet for everybody save the guests 
 of honor, for the big fish were feeding on the little fish below, 
 driving them to the surface for the gulls, who passed what they 
 could not catch back to the big fish, and the fishermen came 
 with nets and lines that gathered in everything but the gulls, 
 so everybody was happy but the little fish, as usual. 
 
 On his 69th birthday he wrote: 
 
 Every year of the 69 came along and laid its long forgotten 
 burdens on my old back. Nevertheless I had a good time. The 
 day was beautiful, and love came under the years and lifted 
 them as lightly as the sunlight carries a cloud. Violet gave all 
 the day to amusing and cheering her husband. A little music, 
 a little reading, a great deal of talking, some hand in hand 
 dreaming, and the day was golden with promise and sweet 
 with its tenderness. 
 
 In August his illness grew for a time more acute, and 
 the possibility of a surgical operation was discussed 
 with his physician. To this, however, he objected, as 
 there was no positive assurance of definite result. In 
 August he notes: 
 
 As the Chautauqua management continues to announce 
 my coming lectures, I sent notices this morriing to the Times, 
 Herald and Tribune that my engagements have all been 
 cancelled. 
 
 361 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 To James B. Weaver of Des Moines, Iowa, a son of 
 the distinguished Iowa pioneer, who was a close friend 
 of Burdette in the early days, he wrote in expressing 
 his inability to attend a home coming meeting of the 
 former lowans who had achieved distinction, to be 
 guests of the Iowa Press and Authors Club: 
 
 I wish I could come home with you boys next October. 
 How I would enjoy myself with the men I loved and played 
 with when hate was a thing as strange as murder. Sometimes 
 we did play with hard gloves, but as I remember, the fellow who 
 got knocked down never got knocked out. He fought just as 
 hard on his back as on his feet. Harder, in fact, because 
 when he was down he fought with his head, hands, feet, claws 
 and teeth. Now I am old and I cannot even fight with a toma 
 hawk, and I don t want to. 
 
 On another occasion, writing his friend Strickland 
 Gillilan, who had sent him a message of cheer on the 
 occasion of Riley s birthday, when some choice spirits 
 had foregathered, he said: 
 
 I do want you boys to know how greatly I appreciate the 
 good things you said about me when you foregathered on Jim s 
 birthday. To think that kid is only 60. He has yet ten years 
 of good work left in his bones. 
 
 And in the same letter, referring to his gathering 
 together of the fugitive sketches and poems from news 
 paper files into scrap books, he wrote: 
 
 My scrap book stuff, my own output, is piled up in my den 
 like bound files of newspapers. Sometimes, as I run over a 
 few pages of it, I would give several dollars and twenty-five 
 cents to know what I meant by it, and some of it, well, I would 
 really admire it if any other fellow had written it. 
 
 His letters were filled with observations wrought 
 out of his experience, and showing his philosophical 
 understanding of life, for instance this sentence: 
 362 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 There are so many things in this world and this life we 
 cannot understand that it is a good thing we shall have all 
 eternity in which to study some of the things which the summer 
 schools of philosophy find out all about during the dog days. 
 
 And to his friend McManus he harked back across 
 the years when he wrote: 
 
 Oh, McManus! What an awful big old wilderness of a 
 world it is. Who is the fool that thinks it is so little? Seas and 
 rivers and prairies and mountains stretching out a million miles 
 between friends who ought to be side-fence neighbors. I hope 
 Heaven is a nice little place, not much bigger than Howe, where 
 we can all be close together. 
 
 Writing to his old friend, "Doc" Worthington, he 
 said: 
 
 I don t mind growing old. That I always looked forward 
 to with a certain pleasure, but I don t like being sick. I love 
 to see my friends but a crowd of people tires the heart out of 
 me. I have ceased to preach and lecture pulpit and platform 
 days have gone by. But I still write a little every week. Well ; 
 I have had a good time all my life. Everything has come my 
 way. I have had more friends at every turn than I could ever 
 count. My dreams have nearly all come true. I have laughed 
 a hundred times where I cried once. And I have no complaint 
 to make of life or this world. It s a beautiful world and a good 
 one. But there is one far more beautiful and infinitely better. 
 That is one of the things I know most positively, most certainly. 
 The God who made this world could easily make a better one. 
 
 Good-bye, Doc. Dear friend and loyal comrade, my mem 
 ory runs back very lovingly to the days when we were school 
 boys in the old "Peoria High". And when I lay down the pen 
 I will dream of them for a happy hour. God bless you, and 
 all who are dear to you. 
 
 And in the same letter, in referring to the beginnings 
 of the illness from which eventually he died, he said: 
 
 I am not an invalid yet. I am not bed-ridden, nor yet 
 housebound, but I am weak and the pen and the machine too, 
 
 363 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 for that matter has grown to be a grievous burden to me. The 
 medicine men name my complaint "Chronic Pancreatitis", 
 and it is coming to closer grips with me day by day. They did 
 think very seriously of sending me down to Baltimore to have 
 the great surgeon at Johns Hopkins take me apart and see what 
 made me act that way, but I am past 69, and there was some 
 question as to their getting the old man back together again 
 without losing some of the pieces. 
 
 Short motor trips were taken, but they were not 
 always possible, for he notes the striking of "joy rides 
 from the docket, because the best road to Long Beach 
 is a succession of comminuted fractures". 
 
 He enjoyed brief visits from close friends. There 
 are many references to his friend, Norman Bridge of 
 Los Angeles, in whose stimulating companionship he 
 took great delight. 
 
 He took much enjoyment in the company of his 
 little granddaughter, Clara, and says: 
 
 It is a good thing for us to have young life come in now and 
 then and dynamite us out of the ruts. 
 
 Before he, himself, had reached middle life, he wrote 
 this bit of sweet philosophy: 
 
 " But/ you say, "cannot one be young-hearted after forty?" 
 Yea, beloved, after sixty or seventy. Down to the days of 
 whitehaired old age the heart may glow with tenderness, and 
 the quiet warmth of the June sunshine of years ago stored 
 in its chambers as years ago the sun stored his heat and light 
 away in the forests of the earth, to dance and gleam and glow 
 again in merry flames and summer warmth upon the coal-fed 
 hearths to-day. 
 
 For this reason, oh, my young readers, rejoice in the days 
 of your youth, when the light is sweet and it is a pleasant thing 
 for the eyes to behold the sun; let your hearts cheer for you 
 in these days of sunshine and nights of starlight, and "remove 
 anger from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh," re 
 membering "the days of darkness, for they shall be many!" 
 364 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 And the firelight that will come to glow upon the hearth 
 and dance in warmth and tenderness upon the walls of your 
 heart s chambers in those days will be the light you are storing 
 away now. Be happy and light-hearted, then; but be the 
 house of your mirth as pure as a temple, and your laughter 
 sinless as the songs of birds; in all your mirth and dancing, 
 exalt Wisdom; and, indeed she shall bring thee to honor, and 
 give to thine head an ornament of grace; then shall the years 
 of thy life be many and thy heart be ever young. 
 
 In September there was a consultation of physicians, 
 and of one of the consultants he says: 
 
 He asked a Catling gun series of questions that began 
 with July 30, 1844, at Greensboro, Pa., and came down smoothly 
 to September 6, 1913, Los Angeles, without a break or a jar. 
 
 Again in September he notes that 
 
 "bed is one of the nicest places in the world to sleep in. It is 
 the worst place in the world to lie awake. 
 
 Much he enjoyed a visit from his son Robin in the 
 fall, and he notes: 
 
 Robin sat at the piano and played for an hour in his sweet 
 old way, a pot pourri of all the old and some of the new tunes, 
 all woven together in Robin s own fashion. Hour after hour 
 he plays, his soul absorbed in his music, and life a vision for 
 him. I will hear him so long as I live, and I will catch echoes 
 of his music in the chorus of heaven. 
 
 And on his son s departure: 
 
 We all knelt together in the sun room and read from Acts 21, 
 the parting on the shore at Tyre, then a little prayer, and Violet 
 took him to Los Angeles, for it is better that I should not go, 
 and my last memory of him is very sweet in beautiful, peaceful 
 Eventide. "And we kneeled down on the shore and prayed, 
 and when we had taken our leave one of another, we took ship, 
 and they returned home again." (Acts 21 : 6, 7.) 
 
 365 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 He had a Scriptural quotation to fit almost every 
 occasion. Upon the return from Eventide to Pasadena 
 his chauffeur was arrested for running over a dog, and 
 in noting the $10 fine subsequently imposed, he says: 
 
 About one dollar for running over it and nine dollars for 
 running away without stopping. "Agree with thine adversary 
 quickly whilst thou art in the way with him." 
 
 On Monday, October 20th, he says: 
 
 I compiled a little of my Philosophy of Life for the Times, 
 but the burden soon became too heavy and I laid it down and 
 lay down beside it. 
 
 But work grew occasionally and he observes that 
 "He must return to do a little long neglected grinding 
 at his dusty mill/ 
 
 Here, in the afternoon of the days, and in the after 
 noon time of life, he wrote his "Little Philosophy of 
 Life", which seemed to be the sum total of all life had 
 meant for him. It was published in December, 1913, 
 and was dedicated to his little granddaughter, Clara 
 Bradley Wheeler, with this beautiful dedication: 
 
 To My Little Granddaughter 
 CLARA BRADLEY WHEELER 
 
 Who, with tottering baby steps, is coming in to the entrance 
 of the Stage of Life, just as her Grandfather, with footsteps 
 equally uncertain, is slowly passing out at its Exit. The baby, 
 doubtless wondering much that the World should be so immeas 
 urably large. He certainly, marvelling, as he looks back, that 
 a Stage so small and circumscribed could hold so many people. 
 She looks at her Grandfather with the Wonder- Wisdom in the 
 baby eyes, but she does not know what he is thinking, nor how 
 much he knows. 
 
 And he, looking at the Little One with the meditative 
 inquiry of Old Age, knows just as little what she is thinking, 
 just as little how much she knows. For a handful of days only 
 366 
 
PAPA" BURDETTE AND CLARA 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 have they known one another, each speaking a language strange 
 and incomprehensible to the other. But the two hearts, one 
 old as the ashes of last year s camp fires, the other young and 
 fragrant as the roses of this June morning, have knitted them 
 selves together with a love that will outlive Time. This is 
 one of the Beautiful Mysteries of Life. "And the Evening and 
 the Morning are another Day." 
 
 No more beautiful review of this booklet was made 
 than that written by Dr. Robert R. Meredith: 
 
 I have just laid down "A Little Philosophy of Life", after 
 reading it for the third time. To me it is most charming and 
 refreshing. There is nothing "little" about it but its size; 
 and bulk is not beauty, nor is bigness greatness. It is a true 
 philosophy cheerful and cheering, warm and radiant with 
 love, grounded in truth and faith, and inspiring spirit-stirring 
 hopes. It carries a message of good cheer that this weary 
 world greatly needs to hear. May the Lord put his blessing 
 upon it, and give it wings. It certainly has done me immense 
 good. I hope to be a better man for the reading of it. 
 
 A companion of this little book was compiled the 
 following Easter under the title of "Alpha and Omega" 
 and dedicated to his other little granddaughter, Caro 
 line Virginia Burdette: 
 
 To my Little Granddaughter 
 CAROLINE VIRGINIA BURDETTE 
 
 A Loving Easter Greeting: 
 To a Tiny Bud of Human Immortality 
 
 A Little Life that please God 
 
 Will unfold its tender leaves into 
 
 Fragrant petals of Beautiful Girlhood 
 
 Perfumed Fruitage of Gracious Womanhood 
 
 All the Way of Her Pilgrimage may 
 
 Hope run singing before her 
 
 Faith walk praying beside her 
 
 And God s twin angels, Mercy and Peace 
 
 Follow close after her. 
 
 367 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 In October, just at leaving Eventide, there is this 
 plaintive entry: 
 
 I have been a daily care. I wish the dear Lord would make 
 me well or take me home. 
 
 And again: 
 
 We are sorry to leave Eventide we are glad to get back 
 to Sunnycrest. I reckon that is the way people feel about 
 leaving this world to go to Heaven. 
 
 On November 1st there is this entry: 
 
 I worked on my war sketches. Got rather tired. War has 
 been over so long. 
 
 His love of flowers was indicated many times by his 
 vivid descriptions of the flora of Pasadena grounds and 
 gardens, as observed by him in his latter days. 
 
 His physical condition was such that it was evident 
 his health was permanently broken, but his long 
 expressed desire to round out his seventy years filled 
 him with ambition and hope to linger, even in 
 suffering, until after July 30, 1914. He talked of it as 
 a boy would talk of some event that had been long 
 promised him. He claimed it with the faith of a man 
 who had proven the promises many times. He dreamed 
 of it as one who would see all his hopes fulfilled, and 
 beyond that he considered nothing except borrowed 
 time that could never be repaid. 
 
 To his old friend, Col. Will Visscher, he wrote: 
 
 And you were with Stanley Waterloo at his last hour of 
 foregathering at the club? Stanley Waterloo! I was a guest 
 in his house ages ago, when he was on the St. Louis Republic, 
 I think, and Eugene Field was on the Journal, and you were 
 beginning a lifelong friendship with that little circle of good 
 comrades. 
 
 What a world it was then! Morning time in the high 
 368 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 Sierras, and the month of June, eternal June. The world 
 created not from chaos, but moulded and welded out of aspira 
 tions, ambitions and purposes: Fortune on the prows and 
 Pleasure at the helm 
 
 " Book of beginnings, story without end, 
 Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend." 
 
 And Stanley has hung "Thirty" on the hook. Who else 
 was there alive so long ago? What has become of all the boys? 
 
 An illustrated story of his life and work in the Times, 
 early in November gave him pleasure, and he notes: 
 
 Reading Henry Warnacks story of "Daddy" exuberantly 
 illustrated. 
 
 Many are the half -philosophical, half -poetical allu 
 sions in his diary. On Tuesday, November llth, this: 
 
 Morning comes gray like a day born old, and I am old with 
 it, tired and weak and racked with pain. Tired me to read, 
 or to talk or to listen, so I didn t do anything. 
 
 But a few days later he sees the other side of the 
 picture, when he says: 
 
 Snow white clouds done in heaps and drifts over the bluest 
 of skies, with golden sunshine streaming through at every 
 opening, and a breeze pure and clear and bracing that is the 
 kind of a morning that lifts its face of benediction upon the 
 world today, and I am better. 
 
 And in making a notation, evidently altogether for 
 himself, in his diary, as to a benefaction made by him 
 to an individual in need, he says: 
 
 I also mailed article to the L. H. J. When I get a check 
 for that somebody else will be waiting for it. I do try to keep 
 my left hand from knowing what my right hand does, but I 
 think the beggar makes some mighty good guesses. 
 
 24 369 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 His days were now alternately good and bad", as 
 he notes them in his diary, and on every good day there 
 is a return, evident from his written expressions, to 
 much of his old buoyance and joyousness, while the 
 bad days are evidenced by a patient uncomplaining 
 resignation. 
 
 A romantic picture might be presented of the period 
 between his first wedding ceremony, which was a typical 
 California wedding at the old Horse Shoe Ranch, the 
 Rose property in Alhambra, and the last wedding cere 
 mony he performed, which was that of Lieutenant 
 Henry Norman Jensen and Echo Allen of Pasadena 
 Avenue, Los Angeles. Between these two were many 
 similar occasions but of infinite variety. The list would 
 have been greater but for his refusal to marry those who 
 had been divorced, his belief being that if the church, 
 through its ministers, would emphasize the fact that 
 there is a reason why they could not be re-married with 
 the sanction of the church, marriage would not be so 
 lightly entered into, the divorce evil be decreased and 
 the sanctity of the home held more sacred. 
 
 Referring to this wedding in his diary, under date of 
 November 17, 1913, he said: 
 
 A charming wedding it was, but when I awoke with a temper 
 ature of 100 degrees, it looked as though some other preacher 
 would get my job, but I rallied, and we all got along very nicely. 
 It was one of the happiest wedding breakfasts I ever attended, 
 and I had two dishes of home-made chocolate ice cream two! 
 That is something to be remembered. I came home and went 
 to bed at once, and did not get out of it for 19 hours. No more 
 weddings, unless I want to couple one with my own funeral. 
 
 And on the following day he notes: 
 
 How it did rain! I am glad Echo Allen was married 
 yesterday. 
 
 370 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 He attended the theatre occasionally, but of a 
 modern play he said: 
 
 Once is enough. I am afraid modern comedy has lost its 
 charm for me. Hereafter I will stick to the old things that 
 have proved themselves, lo, these many years. Maybe, after 
 all, the fault is not in the modern drama. It is hard for an 
 old man to maintain a youthful mind. 
 
 Late in November he notes, "Bed is one of my 
 favorite resorts". 
 
 Just before Christmas he "ran into Hatteras weath 
 er", as he expresses it in his diary, and on December 
 24th he notes: 
 
 I abandoned my Christmas train and left all my things 
 blocking the main line and cluttering the sidings. I will send 
 out what hasn t already been shipped or mailed next Christmas. 
 I can do nothing more this year. 
 
 His diary for 1914, the last year of his life, was the 
 most consistent and continuous he had ever kept, and 
 is complete except for occasional breaks when his weak 
 ness was such that it was impossible for him to write 
 at all. 
 
 In January, 1914, the trained nurse who had been a 
 comfort to him five years before, came to care for him, 
 and from that time on until November 19th, she gave 
 him the most devoted care that a loving trained heart 
 could bestow. I pay a tender tribute to Sara M. Dick, 
 as I am sure he would, for her unselfish devotion, and 
 as she has since passed on, I am sure he was glad to 
 welcome her to the home of which they often talked. 
 
 On January 2, 1914, in a letter to a friend, he wrote: 
 
 In spite of my being sick, I was able to sit up and not make 
 myself a damper on the day (New Year s Day) and if I was 
 miserable I kept my misery to myself. We had a delightful 
 Christmas and a delightful New Year. 
 
 371 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 He saw clearly the approach of the end at the 
 beginning of the year, for the entry of January 1st 
 reads: 
 
 With mingling hope and trust and fear 
 I bid thee welcome untried year, 
 The paths before me pause to view 
 Which shall I shun and which pursue? 
 I make no choice of left or right, 
 But walk straight forward in God s might, 
 So grant me grace my course to run, 
 This is my prayer "Thy will be done." 
 
 The thought and conviction of heart and mind is that this 
 year will end for me in one of the early Spring days. Some 
 time in April or May, and that seems a long time ahead, I 
 expect to close my pilgrimage. I am content. Had I chosen 
 I had lived on to one more birthday, but God s way is best, 
 and I accept it with good cheer and good content. The year 
 is done under cloudy skies, but the heart is full of unchanging 
 sunshine. Day by day I will do my work and set my house 
 in order, and any day He calls, "whether at even or at mid 
 night or at cock-crowing, or in the morning," I will be ready. 
 
 Pain and its accompanying nervousness kept from 
 him the sleep that meant refreshment and restoration, 
 and of the efforts to induce slumber on the part of his 
 physicians and nurses, he says on January 3d: 
 
 No one else can give sleep. It is the gift of God anyhow. 
 Weariness will not woo it. It may sometimes only frighten it. 
 Drugs only bring on a ghastly imitation of it. Often a danger 
 ous imitation. There is not a sleeping mixture in all the 
 pharmacopeia that is not a dangerous poison. Only the sleep 
 that God gives to "His Beloved" is healthful and refreshing. 
 Give me that sleep tonight, dear Lord. 
 
 But with all of his pain and suffering he kept the 
 sweetness and resignation that had marked him through 
 his life. On January 5th he writes: 
 
 372 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 I realize in these sleepless nights, racked with pain, how 
 much I need this "Passive phase" of existence this God- 
 given condition of mere receptivity. Well, I am tired. I will 
 lie down at any rate and pray for the great blessing of sleep. 
 The four things which are not in Thy treasury, I lay before 
 Thee Lord, with this petition my nothingness, my wants, my 
 sins and my contrition. 
 
 Half-seriously and half-humorously occasionally 
 he refers to his condition, and always he was able to 
 look the end fairly in the face without winking. On 
 January 7th an entry in his diary reads: 
 
 Insomnia worries me a great deal. The Doctor issues a 
 solemn warning "go slow" the fact is, if I go any slower 
 I will stop altogether, and I think that is what I am doing, 
 running down. I am "letting the old cat die", and it seems to 
 be a mighty tough old cat, with all its nine lives yet intact. 
 Death seems to have forgotten me. 
 
 And there is a flash of his never-failing fun on Jan 
 uary 24th, when he wrote: 
 
 I breakfasted in bed. Then they took away the tray and 
 I lay there with my head crookedly propped up on the higher 
 corner of a pillow set drunkenly on one end corner-wise, my 
 chin doubled down into my chest, drifting away into delicious 
 sleep. R. came along, lifted my head, took away the extra 
 crooked pillow, smoothed down the remaining one most com 
 fortably, drew me down in the bed, straightened me out, tucked 
 in the covers and said, "There, now you can go to sleep", and 
 being quite wide awake, I got up and dressed. I am getting 
 tired of living merely as a breathing machine. 
 
 And again January 29th: 
 
 The s called in the afternoon. Stanley met them at 
 
 the door, and Heavens! What the pagan sputtered at them! 
 We did not learn until long after they had gone that they had 
 been here. In addition to speaking only Japanese, Stanley is 
 tongue-tied and stammers. It is rather difficult to translate 
 it into English. 
 
 373 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Whenever it was possible, however, he was at his 
 desk, seeking to the last to grind what grist was in the 
 mill. On the last day of January he says: 
 
 In spite of several invitations to drive this morning, I 
 remained in the den and got rid of some work that has been 
 nagging me for ten days. For 45 years it has been my habit 
 to work in the morning and recreate in the afternoon, and I 
 cannot suddenly change the habits of a life time, so the morning 
 sees me chained to the laboring oar at the desk, and so it will 
 be until the oar is broken. 
 
 The Sabbath, which through all of his life he had 
 consecrated apart from the rest of the week, gave him 
 joy. There is an entry February 1st: 
 
 Such a beautiful day it has been, sunny, soft, balmy, fra 
 grant with woodsy odors a very Sabbath of God indeed. 
 
 The day is ended ere I sink to sleep 
 
 My weary spirit seeks repose in Thine, 
 
 Father forgive my trespasses and keep 
 
 This little life of mine 
 
 At peace with all the world, dear Lord, and Thee. 
 
 No fear my soul s unwavering faith can shake, 
 
 All s well whichever side the grave for me 
 
 The morning light may break. 
 
 And his eagerness to finish what work was still 
 before him is reflected in his diary for February 2d, 
 when he says: 
 
 I felt a great deal better this morning. Worked on the 
 war book all morning, but I could not work fast, and had to 
 pause many times for rest. If I could just have one long, 
 exultant, vigorous day, even of a year ago. 
 
 The "war book" referred to was his last sustained 
 literary work, which was the preparation of his volume 
 of "Drums of the 47th", a series of chapters published 
 originally in the Sunday School Times, dealing with 
 374 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 incidents and events of his service as a soldier in the 
 Civil War. 
 
 The book, "Drums of the 47th," was issued in 
 November, 1914, only a few days before his death, 
 when he was so ill he could only see the outlines of the 
 illustration on the paper cover of the book. He com 
 mented on it in detail, and closing his eyes, said, " Violet, 
 this is my last gift to you". But it was not until after 
 he had passed, I found put away in a place where he 
 knew I would discover it, a copy of his poems, "The 
 Silver Trumpets", in which he had pasted on one fly 
 leaf my favorite photograph of himself, and had illus 
 trated each poem by some print or kodak picture which 
 he had carefully selected, knowing that this was to bear 
 a special message to me after he had gone. The book 
 was carefully tied between two pieces of paste board, 
 bound with a white ribbon, and inscribed "Violet s 
 Trumpets". Pasted on the leaf opposite his photo 
 graph was an appreciation, which will ever live in my 
 heart, as I am sure he hoped it would. This was written 
 in a firm, clear hand, showing that the thought of this 
 book had come to him and been carried out while he 
 was yet strong and well, for the lover heart of him was 
 still strong in the desire that though he had gone from 
 me, his message would surprisingly comfort me: 
 
 TO THE 
 DEAREST AND SWEETEST AND BEST 
 
 " His Banner Over Me is Love." 
 
 Pure as the Lily-bell whiter than snow; 
 Heart of a red Rose in the Morning Glow; 
 Flame of the Opal, Splendor of the Noon, 
 At Sunset sweeter than a Dream of June 
 In Twilight soft as breast of brooding Dove 
 The Bridal shadings of a Perfect Love. 
 
 375 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 All Night a silvery Oriflamme of Stars, 
 Waving at dewy Morning s golden bars. 
 In all its jewelled changes Love the same 
 Glory of Sun and Sable Rose and Flame. 
 We twain have walked along our Pilgrim Way 
 Neath skies of sheen and shadow gold and gray; 
 Heart-locked to loving Heart Hand-fast in Hand, 
 Through Life Paths Love-lit to a Love-crowned Land. 
 Clouds and the Sun-gleams blessings from above 
 Always "His Banner Over Us is Love". 
 
 Another reflection of the spirit of the Sabbath is in 
 the entry for Sunday, February 15th: 
 
 All days are much alike to a sick, weak, almost good for 
 nothing old man, yet Sunday is Sunday. It has the Sabbath 
 atmosphere, the day of rest. It is God s own day, therefore 
 man s best and pleasantest day. A day for quiet communion 
 with our dear Heavenly Father and our loving Elder Brother. 
 So little time those busy week-day lives leave for them. The 
 day has been wondrously pleasant. My talk with Roy, 
 especially the part of it on religious and spiritual matters, was 
 especially gratifying to me. 
 
 And on the 17th he wrote: 
 
 A pleasant day. Closing in pleasantly. A day in which 
 happiness found us without putting us to the trouble of looking 
 for her. 
 
 And his familiarity with the scenes of first Christian 
 ity, and his delight in weaving his knowledge into 
 comparisons, is shown on February 18th, when this 
 entry appears: 
 
 Hard rain all day and night. These are the "latter rains". 
 In old Palestine, the land of promise, fall the "early rains" in 
 October and November, quickening the seed sown, preparing 
 the summer baked ground for the fall plowing. Then come 
 the "winter rains" in November and December, stimulating 
 the growth and life of the growing harvests, and then the 
 "latter rains" in March and April, refreshing the maturing 
 376 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 harvests, and renewing life and renewed strength to them, and 
 this is exactly the function of our California rains in their 
 divinely appointed season. 
 
 And when the storm was over, February 22d, he made 
 this note: 
 
 Last evening s rainbow was a true and hopeful prophet 
 and this morning a cloudless sky greeted the clear sunrise with 
 joy and laughter. This land of California can cry harder, stop 
 more quickly, and laugh more happily and whole-heartedly 
 than any other country under the sun. 
 
 Occasionally his physical condition was improved, 
 and there was a revival of the old spirit, for on February 
 25th he wrote: 
 
 Lent begins joyously and beautifully. A lovely day in the 
 heavens, on the mountains and hills, meadows and gardens, 
 and on the ocean. Everybody happy, and I go to the den to 
 begin hard work on my Easter book, and I feel just like it. 
 
 Latter February found him again at Eventide. On 
 the 26th there is this entry: 
 
 Left Sunnycrest at 9.15, running right through Los Angeles 
 without stopping, and in a sunny run of one hour and forty- 
 five minutes, anchored at Eventide. A little restlessness wor 
 ried my sleep till midnight, after that sweet sleep and beautiful 
 night. 
 
 And the following day: 
 
 Violet and the nurse were busy about the house all morning, 
 unpacking, cleaning, dusting, cooking. It is not very much 
 rest for them, even though it is considerable change. It is 
 the way of womankind to make sacrifices for some one else, 
 usually a sick, or oftener a lazy man, who selfishly accepts their 
 sacrifices. Worked all morning and finished the Easter book, 
 "Alpha and Omega" for the hands of the printer by noon. 
 The task had to be done by hand and pen, and left me very 
 much exhausted. 
 
 377 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 As was ever the case, the change to the sea lifted up 
 his spirit. February 28th he wrote: 
 
 Had a little nap before supper. Violet read to me before 
 the driftwood fire in the drawing room, and I went to bed for 
 a good long night s sleep at 8.30, and I got what I went for. 
 Thanks to good careful nursing and the loving care of my dear 
 wife, I am better, lots better, stronger, almost no pain, better 
 stomach, better every way, and still growing better. Hurrah! 
 
 His sense of humor was still keen, and he makes 
 this note concerning the departure of an employee from 
 Sunnycrest on March 7th: 
 
 Gardener leaves us today. When he came here 18 months 
 ago he was a sheep herder who did not know how to fasten a 
 hose to a faucet, and could only tell a garden from a chapparal 
 ranch by the fencing. Now he is a professional "gardener" 
 and goes forth to spoil some man s grounds at expert s wages. 
 
 There are also many of the philosophical reflections 
 that marked all of his work, tempered and mellowed 
 with the added years. On March 24th he writes: 
 
 There is no property on earth more precious than castles in 
 the air. They are so cheap and easy to build. Your own good 
 thoughts, pleasant thoughts, kind thoughts, sweet and pure, 
 are the only materials. You may build where you will and as 
 high as you please and grandly as you please. The expense is 
 all in the up-keep. A moment of hate lays them in ruins. A 
 burst of passion lays low the proudest Chateau d Espagne. A 
 mean thought, an hour of jealousy, of selfishness, destroys the 
 pleasant palace of a beautiful day dream. Every day the 
 castle must be strengthened, repaired, beautified. That takes 
 work, care, watchfulness. So long as the castle stands, it is 
 real as Gibraltar. 
 
 Much he enjoyed the occasional visits from his old 
 friends when his strength was sufficient to permit them. 
 He makes this note on April 2d, referring to the late 
 Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont: 
 378 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 Senator Edmunds called. He brought for me a book long 
 out of print, "Yu-pe-ya s Lute", a translation of a Chinese 
 poem. He read a few pages to me, in that singularly rich voice, 
 the old sympathetic voice that was heard in the United States 
 Senate in 1866. He was born February 1, 1828, now 86 years 
 old, with yet a keen, living interest in contemporary life. 
 
 His interest in public affairs, notwithstanding his 
 impaired hleath, did not abate, and his comments were 
 seasoned with his usual humor. On April 3d his diary 
 shows this entry: 
 
 Morning dawns with news from Mexico that may be 
 believed until the evening papers published at 11 A. M. contra 
 dict it. Villa, the brigand, has captured Torreon. He says so 
 himself, but he is such a liar he may have been killed a week ago. 
 
 After a well-meant call from one who was not by 
 nature gifted to give comfort or inspiration, he observes: 
 
 A well filled mind is better than a well stored library. Its 
 information is ready for use at a thought. It is more than a 
 reservoir. It is a living fountain. A renewing spring. What 
 you remember is the only valuable part of what you read. 
 I have read through thousands of books. I retain only scores. 
 The emptier the mind, the leakier, the less a man knows, the 
 harder he is to entertain. The well filled mind is company for 
 itself. The empty one, like a baby s, has to be amused with 
 tiresome nothings. 
 
 His patience and fortitude under all trials were 
 unswerving, and he determined ever to meet the days 
 with courage. On March 26th he says: 
 
 What I am going to see today will depend less upon what 
 I look at than upon the eyes I see with, and the eyes are windows 
 colored by my heart, my thoughts, my cloudy passions. 
 
 Easter Sunday, April 12th, was observed as his 
 diary indicates: 
 
 I was not very well this morning, suffering from a keen 
 touch of indigestion, but I lay down on one of the West porch 
 
 379 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 cots, adjusted the telephone and listened to the morning service 
 of the Presbyterian Church, hearing Pastor Freeman s sermon 
 quite well. I got much better toward noon, and went to bed 
 at 9 o clock "feelin fine". 
 
 To his son, on March 15th, he wrote: 
 
 Two paragraphs in a Salt Lake City letter of recent date 
 pleased me and interested me immensely, running as they did 
 along the line of my thoughts and my prayers. One of these 
 was to the effect that you were going to lecture at Bethel Church 
 on "A Reporter s Spiel", and the other still more, that you 
 were going to preach for Reverend W. B. Stewart in Bethel 
 Church. I know you have this power of expression and I am 
 so glad that you are going to demonstrate it. 
 
 Enrich your vocabulary. Diversify your expression. Say 
 things in the manner that will make old. things sound new. 
 Remember that hundreds and thousands of preachers have 
 been preaching from the texts you will have to select for nearly 
 two thousand years past. But they haven t used your words; 
 nor your arrangement of phrases, nor your statement of ideas. 
 These things you can make your own. God give you grace 
 and tact and strength, my son. 
 
 Following a more serious recurrence of his illness, 
 there is a penciled notation on Thursday, May 7th: 
 
 "Fergit what did." An empty day. Tonight closes 24 
 hours of oblivion. I don t remember what has happened today. 
 I am writing this page tomorrow and trying to remember 
 whether or no I was alive tomorrow or rather yesterday. If I 
 was I don t remember anything about it, save the headache 
 with which I awoke, and which continued with me all day. 
 
 On the following Sunday he expresses again a belief 
 which he stated frequently in his work: 
 
 "Mother Day" in all the churches except a very few where 
 the preachers had other topics apparently more important. 
 With these I sympathize. The flattest failures I ever made in 
 the pulpit or on the rostrum were when I spoke on a topic 
 supplied by some one else. I not only love to sharpen my own 
 380 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 sword, to make the prayer before the sermon, but I want to 
 make the whole sermon or speech. One man may be blazing 
 with enthusiasm over a subject that is a perfect fire extinguisher 
 for me. 
 
 Amelioration of his acute condition made it possible 
 for him to return to his beloved task of supervising the 
 setting out of new shrubs and flowers, and he makes 
 this comment on May 14th: 
 
 "The breath of flowers is sweeter in the air than in the hand", 
 and what a fragrant country this is. Odor of orange blossoms 
 and fruit, carnations and roses by thousands, and violets, 
 blessing the air, with fragrant shrubs, rare blossoms and the 
 common old-fashioned flowers "sweet letters of the angel tone 
 whose messages whisper themselves in one s very dreams". 
 
 Early June found him better both in mind and body. 
 June 5th he notes that he was "feelin fine". Because 
 of his improved condition and at his solicitation, I kept 
 a long standing engagement in the East, being absent 
 about two weeks. For his comfort and entertainment 
 I had a new motor car delivered to him, the morning of 
 my leaving which like a new toy absorbed his atten 
 tion and lessened the loneliness. 
 
 He found comfort in a poem sent him by Fanny 
 Crosby "a little hymn of joy and consolation": 
 
 Oh, child of God wait patiently, 
 
 Tho dark thy way may be, 
 And let thy faith lean tenderly 
 
 On Him who cares for thee. 
 And tho the clouds hang dimly 
 
 Above the arch of night 
 Yet in the morning joy will come 
 
 And fill thy soul with light. 
 
 On June 8th he wrote: 
 
 It is pretty lonesome in the house with the "Mistress of 
 the Manse " away. Now that sunny weather is here I am going 
 
 381 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 down to Eventide for a day or two to while away a little of the 
 loneliness. I am on the upgrade this week, and the outing will 
 be good for me. Ma ma will be away about three weeks, I 
 reckon. She has been shut up with an invalid for a long time, 
 and I was very insistent on her going away. It will be good 
 for her to get out among women interested in the aifairs that 
 interest her. 
 
 This entry for June 19th is characteristic: 
 
 Miss Dick and I decided it would be a nice thing to take 
 some photographs of pretty little nooks in the garden and 
 illuminate Violet s letters with them, so we set out to find her 
 camera, and found it on the way from Chicago to Ithaca. She 
 took it with her. 
 
 In mid-July his illness returned in a more acute 
 stage, as indicated by his entry of July 13th: 
 
 My mind was at peace and composed for sleep, but my 
 breath was somewhat stertorous and broken, very much like 
 the breath of age. However, merely to breathe freely does not 
 mean to live. I do not like these ovor-frequent stoppages of 
 breath. It is at the least confusing. Ah, well, the end cannot 
 be far away. I will be ready, come when and how and where 
 it may. Strange that men are not always ready for it. 
 
 And again on July 16th: 
 
 "We," which includes the entire household, packed "my" 
 trunk, a job occupying about two hours, and bringing to light 
 a great many things I never knew I had. We are getting ready 
 to live at the dear old home of Eventide for three months until 
 October, and my 70th birthday will fall in 14 days, and "the 
 days of our years are three score years and ten, and if by reason 
 of strength they be four score years, yet is their strength 
 labor and sorrow for it is soon cut off and we fly away". I do 
 not know. Do I care? With every fibre of my heart do I weep 
 for the loved ones who will weep for me.1* Of all, the most for 
 my darling wife, my Violet, but for myself, not a regret, much 
 less a fear, not a shadow of dread. "I have fought the good 
 fight. I have finished my course, I have kept the faith." 
 382 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 Through all the years of his writing, lecturing and 
 preaching, he had indicated his unshaken belief that a 
 man should live to the Biblical three score and ten 
 years, and the firmness of that belief without question 
 sustained him in the struggle for a life that should 
 round out the headlands of seventy. In his diary for 
 Thursday, July 30, 1914, he headlined the page with 
 "Three score and ten" with bold letters in red ink. 
 His physical condition, which he was accustomed to 
 indicate by a brief word on each page of his diary, he 
 notes as "Good", and there is a quotation from Long 
 fellow at the top of the page: 
 
 The holiest of all holidays are those 
 Kept by ourselves in silence and apart, 
 The secret anniversaries of the heart. 
 
 The birthday list of messages, including letters 
 from perhaps every state in the United States, from 
 Canada, and cablegrams from Europe, were delightful 
 to him, as indicating the love and friendship of the 
 thousands to whom and for whom he had preached, 
 lectured and written through a period of more than 
 forty years. He spent part of the day at "Eventide", 
 the summer home at Redondo Beach, on the shores of 
 the Pacific, of which he said in his "Little Philosophy 
 of Life": 
 
 Afternoon land is very pleasant in spite of broken health 
 and increasing weakness. Every evening I sit in the sun-room 
 and watch the sun creep down the western wall of the sky, 
 sinking to its rest beyond the farther rim of the blue Pacific. 
 I know what is over there, because I have journeyed in those 
 lands, and can follow the sun as he fades out of sight and begins 
 to illumine the Orient. There, just where he drops below the 
 waves, rise the green shores of picturesque Japan. Yokohama, 
 Tokyo, Nikko, snow-crowned Fujiyama, the beautiful Inland 
 
 383 
 
ROBERT j. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Sea I can see them all. There where that silver star is shining 
 through the crimson bars of the clouds, is China. Over there, 
 where the clouds are white as snow banks there is Manila. 
 Yonder, where the black cloud is tipped with flame, is Port 
 Arthur. I know them all. I have been there. 
 
 Well, beyond the gates of the sunset, farther away than the 
 stars, away past the bars of the night, there is another land. I 
 have never seen it. I have never seen anyone who has been 
 there. But all that I know about the oriental lands in which 
 I have journeyed is mere conjecture with my positive belief 
 in that Blessed Land which eye hath not seen. That Fair and 
 Happy Country I do know. Know it with a sublime assurance 
 which is never shadowed by a cloud of passing doubt. I may 
 become confused in my terrestrial geography. But this Heaven 
 of ours no man, no circumstance, can ever shake my faith 
 in that. 
 
 As the sun sinks lower and the skies grow darker in the 
 deepening twilight, the star of Faith shines more brightly and 
 Hope sings more clearly and sweetly. Every evening, when the 
 sun goes down, I can see that land of Eternal Morning. I know 
 it is there, not because I have seen it, but because I do see it. 
 The Shadowless Land, "where we shall hunger no more, neither 
 thirst any more; where there shall be no more death, neither 
 sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; where 
 God shall dwell with men, and they shall be His people, and He 
 shall wipe away all tears from their eyes". 
 
 His last published expression to the great number 
 of his readers was a letter written for the Los Angeles 
 Times, to be published upon his 70th birthday, and 
 in that he sums up his experiences of the past, his 
 impressions and the realization of his dream of seventy, 
 and his faith for the future, in these words: 
 
 The days of our years are three score years and ten. 
 
 When I was a little boy I heard Dr. Henry G. Weston, 
 then pastor of the First Baptist Church of Peoria, 111., preach 
 a sermon from that passage in the ninetieth Psalm. And 
 when I was a big boy as big as I ever grew to be I heard 
 384 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 Henry Ward Beecher preach from the same text. These two 
 sermons by two great preachers burned into the very soul of me. 
 There was nothing terrifying about them. They were gentle; 
 mighty in their reassuring quality. They made the life that 
 now is a certain thing to me. Whatever other problems might 
 remain to be insoluble mysteries the minimum duration of life 
 was to me a fixed fact. I might, by the loving wisdom of the 
 Creator, live to be a very old man. But if I lived anywhere 
 near right, die before seventy I would not. 
 
 I believed in that measure of life with a boy s unquestioning 
 belief in the Book. It never left me, and it has not failed me. 
 I never questioned it, and I have all my life been an old- 
 fashioned believer in the Bible. 
 
 This question of the uncertainty of life is one that naturally 
 enough has often come up. I have never had but one argu 
 ment, which I paraphrased from the disciple Philip, "Watch 
 me and see". I said it positively at least more than fifty 
 years ago. I have said it at frequent intervals since. And I 
 am going out of this month July, having leaned on that assur 
 ance "three score years and ten". I am not at all surprised. 
 I am grateful; lovingly, happily, joyously grateful. But I 
 always knew it. 
 
 I have been afraid in the face of threatening peril many 
 and many a time. I have felt the human fear of death, often 
 enough, even when I was confident I would not die. I have 
 often enough been frightened by the fear of harm I know the 
 extreme dread of physical pain. I was a soldier for three years. 
 I have fought through a score of battles. I never went into 
 one of them without feeling my heart sink at the fear of a wound. 
 
 But I never prayed that I might be kept from death. I 
 was too young to die. I knew that. But to be hurt with the 
 cruelty of war! To writhe under some mangling wound; to 
 suffer all night long writhing in a pelting storm, under the 
 throbbing lunge of bayonet or the fierce shock of shot or shell 
 this filled me with fainting terror. 
 
 How does it feel to reach the official limit of life? Well 
 there is no shock. You knew all the time it was coming. You 
 come to harbor expectantly, don t you? As Frederick the Great 
 said to his Grenadiers, recoiling for the third time before the 
 flaming thunder of the Austrian guns "What, then, do you 
 25 385 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 want to live forever? * No matter how smooth and beautiful 
 the sea, no matter how pleasant the ship, you want to get to 
 port some time; you want to get home some day; you don t 
 want to sail round and round forever. There is a better world 
 than this; a fairer one; lovelier skies and sweeter fields. This 
 world isn t a treadmill. It s a country through which you are 
 journeying. The way of your pilgrimage leads somewhere. 
 Don t you want to get to where you re going? Or are you like 
 Booker Washington s old colored woman " Where you going, 
 auntie?" "Law bless you, honey, I se done bin whah I m 
 gwine." 
 
 One very impressive feeling comes to you on the morning 
 of your seventieth birthday. If you believe as I do, this is 
 your last birthday anniversary. No more birthdays. Why, 
 if you look at it through my spectacles, you re through with 
 time. This is the beginning of eternity. 
 
 Some men passing on from this point say, " Now I am living 
 on borrowed time." Not much you are not. There is no such 
 thing as borrowed time. It s the freest gift in the universe. 
 I may live for five years yet; or ten. If I do it will be on the 
 same kind of time as composed the seventy years I have lived 
 already, not one of which was borrowed. If you borrow any 
 thing you expect to repay it. Well, you can t pay back any 
 time. If I went to the only One who can give me time, I d as 
 soon ask for a thousand years it s only a watch in the night 
 to Him as for a day. I could repay the one as easily as I 
 can the other. " Lord, let me have a couple of thousand years? " 
 "Surely, man; when will you give them back?" 
 
 No, I don t "feel just as young as I used to be". Not so 
 young, even, as I felt ten years ago; I have met men who felt 
 at seventy just as they did at twenty-five. They have told me 
 so themselves. But the Lord only knows how they felt at 
 twenty-five. I don t feel nearly so well as I did at sixty. But 
 I have an idea that maybe I ll pick up a little in the "velvet" 
 time that may be coming to me. 
 
 One thing I do know where I have the advantage over the 
 youth of twenty-five. I can go into heaven now without any mis 
 givings. I won t stop and apologize, and explain how I happen to 
 come along ten or fifteen years ahead of my appointed time. I 
 have lived out my "three score years and ten". I have been 
 386 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 trusted on the earth the fullness of my allotted time. As for the 
 velvet days that may be given well, Moses says all the rest of 
 it, the very "pride" of it, is only "labor and sorrow". And he 
 ought to know; he tried it for fifty years longer. 
 
 For the matter of those human burdens, they may yet be 
 given to me. Very little have I known of them in my allotted 
 "three score and ten". Good years have they been to me. So 
 little sickness has there been in them, and so little pain, and all 
 the pain and sickness were sent along in the years of the later 
 time, in which I had grown used to living, and accustomed to 
 the sudden surprises of life, and had plenty of time for sickness. 
 
 I have had so few disappointments they have hardly been 
 worth entering on the books, and the great majority have been 
 through my own fault, as indeed have been about all my 
 troubles. Very few of them can I charge up against the dear 
 Lord. In fact, the worst I have gotten into, He has done His 
 best to keep me out of, and I have worked my way into them 
 in spite of Him. And I have never known Him to hesitate to 
 help me out of them. And it seems to me I rarely, if ever, had 
 to cry to Him for help. All I had to do was to let Him help 
 me just to keep my hands off and let Him do for me. 
 
 I have lived with this world now for seventy years, in it 
 and on it and for it. It has paid me fair wages and has insisted 
 on the full tale of brick every day. It has never overpaid me, 
 but it has never held back my salary, because I always found 
 out in time to call a strike about a week before the date of the 
 lock-out. It has been a good, fair world to live in with both 
 eyes wide open, but it is no world for fools. I am as ready to 
 leave it as I was to come into it. And as I was brought into 
 it without my wishes being consulted, I will expect to be called 
 out of it just as summarily, and will go just as willingly as I 
 came. 
 
 The letters and cards that came to him were read 
 as the postman brought them, and his eye lighted with 
 many a smile, dimmed with many a tear, and his heart 
 was made joyous with many a glad recollection as they 
 touched some chord of memory. They came from his 
 old friends at Peoria and Burlington, from his birth* 
 
 387 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 place at Greensboro, from the old homes at Ardmore 
 and Bryn Mawr, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
 and from the Lakes to the Gulf, expressing love and 
 friendship, hope and cheer, encouragement, words of 
 recollected inspiration from his voice and pen, a ver 
 itable treasure trove of stimulating and joyous recol 
 lection. 
 
 It was a beautiful vision he had backward toward 
 the years in which he was made to feel his work had 
 been genuinely joyous and helpful, and forward to the 
 rewards of faith and trust and labor of which he felt so 
 sure. His whole view of life was sweet, tolerant and 
 kindly. Of California, in which he had had so much 
 of honor, happiness and joy, he said: 
 
 It is where it rains a little every morning when you want 
 to work, and the sun shines all afternoon when you want to 
 play, and it grows dark and quiet at night. 
 
 And that might have been said with equal truth of 
 the years of his life, for it had rained in his life much of 
 pathos; there had been much sunshine of humor and 
 gladness, and he saw it grow dark and quiet at night 
 with a splendid faith and a beautiful trust in the future 
 beyond the sea. 
 
 The entry in his diary for the day following, 
 Friday, July 31st, was: 
 
 Began the morning after with a jolly breakfast, then a quiet 
 morning with myself and Violet in the sun room and Robin at 
 the piano. Such a lovely morning and such a delightful day. 
 The loveliest drive in the afternoon down to San Pedro by the 
 coast road. Beautiful! Home by the inland turnpike. The 
 birthday and "the morning after" were beautifully auspicious, 
 weather and physical condition full of promise and radiant 
 hope. And oh, the joy of having Robin here! It brings the 
 old days back again just to hear him at the piano just to talk 
 
 388 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 with him. And Violet s tenderness multiplies itself tenfold 
 as the hours go by so thoughtful sweet. My dear, dear 
 sweetheart wife! 
 
 The world well tried, the sweetest thing in life, 
 Is the unclouded welcome of a wife. 
 
 But the philosophical contemplation of life and its 
 burdens to which he had schooled himself, is reflected 
 in an entry in his diary of August 3rd: 
 
 The day has lived itself. One day at a time, so life runs on. 
 Well for us that we do not have to carryall the burden of seventy 
 years in one day or one year. Well for us that there are no 
 long stretches in the march, no long conflicts in the battle of 
 life. Life comes to us only one day at a time. Even tomorrow 
 is not ours until it comes as today. A sweet and blessed secret 
 this living from day to day. God s own loving hand tenderly 
 lets down the soft curtain of night upon the close of each day. 
 
 He became unconscious on Tuesday, August 4th, 
 and lingered in that state for three days. On Tuesday, 
 August 18th, he wrote: 
 
 After it was over and past, they told me, long days after, 
 that this day was the crisis. I can remember nothing about 
 it save that love hovered around and over me more tenderly 
 than ever, and came closer to me as the world seemed to drift 
 farther away. 
 
 Our principal concern then was to restore his 
 strength sufficiently that he might be taken back to 
 Sunnycrest. 
 
 His Philosophy of Life is summed up in some para 
 graphs from the little book bearing that name: 
 
 Well, I have always loved to work. It has been pleasant 
 in the old mill, with its rafters bronzing by the years, its shadowy 
 corners, its far views from the dormers up in the loft, the myste 
 rious gurglings and murmurings of hidden waters down deep 
 among the foundations, the quiet pond and the earnest rush 
 
 389 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 of the race, and the merry laughter of the "tail race* . For I 
 ground my finest flour from the grist the people brought me. 
 The best of my work might have been done much better; the 
 worst of it had better been left undone; all of it has been 
 mediocre. But I ground the grist that was brought me, and 
 took only fair toll. And some day, in a better mill, with 
 improved machinery, with finer material, with choicer grist, a 
 steadier power and a better light I will do better work. 
 
 A good father and a good mother " old-fashioned "? 
 Well, yes; about as old-fashioned as fathers and mothers have 
 been since the birth of Cain taught me from a Good Book 
 that the way of life and the plan of salvation is so simple and 
 plain that not even the philosophers could muddle it " He hath 
 showed thee, man, what is good, and what doth the Lord 
 require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly 
 with God." That s plain enough until some learned man begins 
 to explain it. If that s all that God wants of me, I don t care 
 what the "Apostle s Creed", or the "Thirty-nine Articles", or 
 the " Confession of Faith" demands of me. But that seems 
 to include about everything. And yet I believe in creeds. 
 How can a man live without a standard? 
 
 I never worry about the Day of Judgment. That there 
 will be one I am positive. That it will be as dreadful as John 
 of Patmos describes, I believe. But terrible as it will be to 
 have all one s sins uncovered and set before God and the world, 
 naked and in the light of day, that won t be one-half so terrible 
 as it was to have committed them. And yet that we rather 
 enjoyed. 
 
 And another most dreadful thing about the Day of Judg 
 ment is the fact that somebody knows all about our sins now. 
 There never was a "secret sin" since the serpent invaded Eden. 
 There have been at least three living eyewitnesses to every 
 offense the sinner, the victim, who is frequently only the other 
 sinner, and the Judge who is going to try you both. The best 
 time to get scared about the Day of Judgment is about ten 
 minutes before you make a fool of yourself. 
 
 Life has been to me a pilgrimage of joy. I ve never had 
 very much trouble, and what I have had has been of my own 
 making and selection, and when I went to the hospital I took 
 my medicine without making faces or asking for "sympathy". 
 390 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 I was ashamed to. Like "Peter and the Pain Killer", I knew 
 I was only getting what I had asked for. But up one hill and 
 down the other the pilgrimage had lain through pleasant 
 places good roads, safe trails, fine pasturage, sweet water and 
 beautiful camping places. A few giants, mostly wind-mills; 
 millions of midgets and mosquitoes, troublesome but not fatal; 
 occasionally a mean man, so ashamed of himself that he lied 
 about it; now and then a liar; once in a while a hold-up man, 
 with a subscription paper; and all along the way a horde of 
 beggars. 
 
 But in the main good people; kind-hearted, generous 
 people, honest people. Lots of houses built close "by the 
 side of the road". The world is full of friendly people for 
 friendly men. And I m fond of people. I believe in them, 
 I love them. I sympathize with them. I like to meet them, 
 and to walk with them, and to have them about me, so long as 
 they can stand me. 
 
 A young disciple one day asked me, when I was pastor of 
 the Temple, "Pastor, how can I learn to trust God? How 
 can I acquire faith?" And I said, "That is easy and simple. 
 Just lie down at night and go to sleep. You are helpless and 
 defenseless as a dead person. You do not see the storm gather 
 ing above your home, with black destruction in its whirling 
 wings. You cannot see the tiny tongue of flame catching at 
 the corner of the room in which you sleep. You do not hear 
 the robber stealthily unfastening the fancied security of lock 
 and bolt. You know absolutely nothing of the score of evils 
 that may be threatening your peace and safety. The night 
 may be ghastly with perils all about you. But you sleep 
 sweetly, safely, and you awake in the morning refreshed and 
 strengthened. Protecting love has enfolded you like a gar 
 ment. And you believed it would when you lay down, else 
 you never could have gone to sleep. Well, that s trust. 
 That s perfect trust. Just hold on to it while you are awake. 
 Who takes care of you while you sleep? Not father and 
 mother. Not the servants. Not the watchdog. Nor the 
 policeman a mile away. Except the Lord keep the city, the 
 watchman waketh but in vain/ You trust in God, that s all." 
 
 Do I believe in laughter as much as ever I did? A great 
 deal more than ever I did, even in the days that were ripples 
 
 391 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 of dimples on the sunlit eddies of a river of laughter. How 
 could life be best lived without it God s exclusive gift to his 
 human children? Laughter is a good servant. But don t 
 overwork him or he will sulk, and maybe strike for shorter 
 hours. Don t smile so much all day that the corners of your 
 mouth droop with weariness when you come home at night. 
 "Always leave them with a laugh" is the axiom of a commercial 
 traveler who has no home. 
 
 Laughter is cheery, good-natured, willing, but wearies 
 easily. He is a poor hand at "day s work" and tires at a con 
 tinuous job. He is a thoroughbred, and must be humored and 
 well groomed. You can t work him like a plow-horse. He 
 shines most brightly at "piece work". He must needs have 
 intervals of quiet meditation; sober reflection; tranquil intro 
 spection. He must have the inspiration of earnest purpose; 
 the repose of a little minute of prayer. 
 
 Don t mistake the everlasting barnyard cackle that ema 
 nates from between the roof of the mouth and the epiglottis for 
 laughter. Unless there is brain and heart intellect and love 
 in it it isn t the laughter that I know anything about. The 
 thing on the face of a skull is a grin, but it isn t a smile. It 
 used to be, but the smile died when it became perpetual. No 
 matter what the empty-headed philosophers say on the post 
 cards, don t try to smile all the time. Unless you want people 
 to hate the sight of you. 
 
 Life is a book in which we read a page a day. We can t 
 read a page ahead; we can not turn clear over to the last 
 chapter to see how it ends, because we write the story our 
 selves, setting the type, as a good compositor can do, from the 
 copy of our own thoughts and actions, till the evening of each 
 day runs off the edition. The best compositor is he who sets 
 each day s page with the fewest errors, and wastes the least 
 time correcting a "dirty proof". 
 
 Even with the best of us, much of each day s page is an 
 "errata" correcting the mistakes of yesterday. Unsinkable 
 ships the bottom of the sea is covered with them. Invulner 
 able armor it cumbers the reefs, full of holes. Incontro 
 vertible arguments and incontestable theories they lie dusting 
 in the scrap-heaps of history and philosophy, answered, con 
 tradicted, disproved and thrown away. But the pages are 
 392 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 or should be growing cleaner every day. The compositor 
 learns. The child is fearless, knowing nothing. So he grasps 
 the flaming candle. The old man is cautious, knowing too 
 much. He knows that ice burns like fire. 
 
 And another thing to be remembered about this book of life 
 which every one of us is writing, each for himself. The pages 
 are all the same size twenty-four hours, brevier measure. 
 "The evening and the morning was the first day." That 
 established the standard. And every morning the inexorable 
 office boy with the intolerable name stands at your door shout 
 ing "copy!" And you ve got to furnish it. Got to. Got to. 
 Got to. Kill your grandmother once a week to get to the ball 
 game if you will that goes into your "story" and fills up that 
 day s page. That s life. 
 
 Is the world as funny as it used to be? Funnier, my son; 
 a great deal funnier. It grows "funnier" as you grow older. 
 But it doesn t know it, because it is apt to be "funniest" when 
 it thinks it is wisest. Laughter grows more serious as it con 
 templates the funny old world. The tragedies of the years 
 temper the jests. Yes; I understand. I read a paragraph 
 about myself in a critical editorial the other day, saying that 
 "ten years of the ministry had taken much of the ginger out 
 of old Bob s fun". 
 
 It was written by a young man of course. The things 
 that are funny to him were uproariously funny to me fifty 
 years ago. I used to write funny sketches about sudden death 
 and funerals. But during ten years of the ministry I have sat 
 beside many deathbeds, and have stood beside many caskets 
 trying to speak words of consolation for breaking hearts. 
 Today, I can t laugh over "Buck Fanshaw s Funeral" the 
 funniest mortuary narrative ever written. 
 
 Misfortunes used to be my principal stock in trade for 
 mirthful sketches. Ten years in the ministry have made the 
 sorrows of thousands of people my own. What a rollick there 
 used to be in a good poker story, told in rattling phrase. I 
 have seen too many homes broken up and too many lives 
 wrecked by the gamblers to appreciate the humor of the cards. 
 Twice I have seen men murdered at the gaming table and 
 each murder was followed by a hanging. Hard to write funny 
 poker stories with those grisly phantoms of blood and stran- 
 
 393 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 gling leering up into your face from the white sheet under your 
 pen. Eh? 
 
 And when there was nothing else to write about on a dull 
 day, the drunkard was always an unfailing figure for comedy. 
 What could be funnier than a drunken man? Well, now I can 
 no more appreciate the drunken man, even on the comic stage, 
 than the wife whose face he bruised with his clenched fist 
 could appreciate the antics of her drunken husband. I have 
 seen the brute too often at close range, with all the old manhood 
 gone, and not a thing but the brute and the devil left. 
 
 Oh, I enjoy life better than ever I did. I can assure my 
 critic that "ginger is still hot i the mouth". The world is just 
 as funny as ever. But the fun has changed with the point 
 of view. Don t you understand, son? It s the old story of the 
 frogs and the boys. Humor is a matter of personal taste, to a 
 great extent. What sends your neighbor into convulsions of 
 mirth may disgust you to the very soul. . . . 
 
 The shadows are deepening around the pond and the 
 stream is singing itself to sleep. But there is yet a little grist 
 in the hopper, and while the water serves I will keep on grind 
 ing. And by the time the sun is down, and the flow in the race 
 is not enough to turn the big wheel, the grist will have run out, 
 and I will have the old mill swept and tidied for the night. 
 And then, for home and a cheery evening, a quiet night, lighted 
 with stars and pillowed with sleep. And after that, the dawn 
 ing, and another day; fairer than any I have ever seen in this 
 beautiful world of roseate mornings and radiant sunsets. 
 
 From Thursday, August 21st, to Monday, August 
 31st, there are no entries in his diary, the reason for 
 which is indicated by his entry of August 15th: 
 
 "Mighty sick." Nothing very important happens to a 
 man lying on his back wondering what has happened to him. 
 I am very sick, but do not know how long I have been so. 
 
 And above the blank pages afterwards he penciled 
 a heading: 
 
 These monotonous days of sickness give no seed for thought 
 and still less incident. 
 
 394 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 The beginning of September found him growing 
 weaker, but his spirit still strong. On September 1st 
 he writes: 
 
 Another month begins with love and mercy, and I know 
 it will rain blessings for thirty days to come. Not pleasures, 
 which are evanescent and shortlived at the best and longest, 
 but the blessings of God, which endure forever. Every morn 
 ing this month will see a new day s journey begun with God for 
 a companion. I will not walk one day without my Shepherd so 
 I will not walk astray. Thirsting, I will follow my Shepherd 
 beside still waters. Weary, I will lie down in green pastures 
 and refresh my soul. All the way He will lead me. Some of 
 the days will be dark and some will be stormy. There will be 
 danger and there will come sorrow. But the worst day will 
 be safe as the best, and be the journey long or short, at the last 
 I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Welcome the 
 month and its days. 
 
 And the same spirit is indicated in the entry for Sep 
 tember 12th: 
 
 Had a good nap in the afternoon and came to curfew 
 "feelin* fine". I am wonderfully encouraged. Hope is so 
 strong that I cannot make the possible disappointments 
 frighten me. I seem to be growing stronger by weakness. 
 But with age, our disappointments linger longer than they 
 did in youth. We think more about them. Youth has a way 
 of trampling them under foot that we lose in age just when we 
 most need to cultivate that contempt for them. After all, our 
 disappointments are our own self-inflicted penalties for our 
 greater devotion to our own schemes, rather than to God s 
 plans for us. 
 
 On September 13th he wrote: 
 
 I find that writing is an increasing burden to my awkward 
 hands. 
 
 Until his body grew so weak that the physical task 
 of writing was impossible, he was loyal to his pen and 
 typewriter. This is the entry for September 17th: 
 
 395 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 My siesta lasted until 4 P. M., and I could have slept longer, 
 but I want to write a column for the Times the first thing 
 I have written since I was seventy years old. 
 
 September 19th: 
 
 I finished my Times article, "A Sick Man Goes to War." 
 
 His last contribution to the Times was written late 
 in September "Don t Duck Jim": 
 
 Jim in the front rank is dodging "the big ones". Right 
 behind him his file closer, Bill, trying to imitate him, reproves 
 him: 
 
 "Don t duck, Jim, doggone it I m right behind you!" 
 
 The sentiment may be gathered from the closing 
 paragraph: 
 
 Boy, honored by any station on the firing line, when the 
 firing is the hottest, when the temptation to run is the fiercest, 
 when fear is stronger than honor, forget yourself. Think of the 
 fellows right behind you, whose good name God has entrusted 
 to you, who will fall down if you shrink, who will run if you 
 tremble, who will get drunk if you drink, who will lie if you 
 "prevaricate", and "don t duck, Jim". Think of the poor 
 fellow behind you. 
 
 His weakness increased in latter September, for on 
 September 25th he says: 
 
 I think I am growing weaker these days. I cannot walk 
 so far, and I come home from my drives a little more weary 
 than formerly. 
 
 But his humor survived his weakness. His teeth 
 had been through his life a source of constant pain and 
 trouble, and he inveighs against them on September 
 26th: 
 
 Teeth were the first curse of the human race. Sin came 
 with the first bite of the forbidden fruit. My teeth have been 
 to me a source of disfigurement and pain and all manner of 
 
 396 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 trouble ever since I have known anything about them. The 
 ways of the Creator are wonderful indeed, but I must say He 
 has done about the worst dental work for me I ever knew to 
 misfit the mouth of a human being. I don t know what I 
 would have done but for the improvements now and then of 
 human workmen. 
 
 September 27th, his diary is headed 
 
 Roy s birthday thirty-two years old, [this written in very 
 large print], and he weighs 180 pounds. Here his Daddy is 
 over seventy, [and written in very small print] and he weighs 
 only 139 pounds. 
 
 And that same day, with a sweet joy, he made his 
 final effort at concentration on expression with rhythm 
 and wrote for Roy s birthday, the following: 
 
 To MY SON ROY 
 
 A Prayer for his 32nd birthday 
 
 Dawn of another Year! Come closer, Mighty Guide! 
 
 A new path stretches from my earthly door; 
 Dim mountains rise, and far before me leads 
 A trail my feet have never trod before. 
 
 Time brings more burdens. My task is just begun, 
 Then bring new labor songs for me to sing; 
 
 You ve taught me hymns to greet the rising sun, 
 Now teach me how to praise the noon-day King. 
 
 Chansons of Service! Let my gladdened eyes 
 Laugh with the glory of each passing day; 
 
 Glad with the gladness of some sweet surprise 
 That marks the blessing of each passing day. 
 
 Make every day a Birth-day God my Hope, 
 
 New plans; new joys; new duties and new dreams; 
 Give me new light when midst the fogs I grope, 
 And lead my wandering feet beside still streams. 
 
 Lovingly, DADDY. 
 
 397 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Just before he left Eventide to return to Sunnycrest, 
 he wrote on September 28, 1914: 
 
 I do trust God. It is little to my credit. I am so helpless 
 I can do nothing else but trust. Lord, I can no longer try to 
 help others. I can no longer do any good to others. Lead me 
 day by day into the splendor of trust and joy and hope and of 
 love. 
 
 The return to Sunnycrest was on September 30th, 
 and his diary has only occasional and fragmentary 
 observations until October 17th, when he says: 
 
 Splendid night, fine morning. Woke up feeling fine. Got 
 over it by shaving, which I inflicted on myself . 
 
 The last efforts with his typewriter was when he 
 outlined a word of greeting in response to the real 
 estate men of Pasadena, who solicited an expression from 
 him. The manuscript showed failing strength and 
 inability to concentrate upon the mechanism which had 
 served him so many years. 
 
 He seemed to realize himself the nearness of the end 
 of his journey, for on October 21st he wrote: 
 
 Dr. Nichols called early this morning before 8 o clock. I 
 reckon I must be getting worse. I know I am keeping no 
 stronger. I shaved myself about 11 o clock and the operation 
 made me very tired. Got one letter in the morning mail, 
 which Sara answered for me. It was from a correspondent 
 who sent me a package of casaba melon seed, and wanted to 
 know when and under what circumstances God made up his 
 mind to destroy the race of men. 
 
 And the last entry in his diary is on Sunday, Novem 
 ber 1st: 
 
 It is very hard to write. I guess my writing days are ended 
 and the amanuensis will come on deck for duty. 
 
 398 
 
THE CLOSING YEARS 
 
 He became unconscious a few days later, lingered 
 in that state, with occasional momentary flashes of 
 consciousness, until he died on November 19th. 
 
 His parting message to Temple Baptist Church, 
 given to me as I stood by his bed during his last con 
 scious moments, was 
 
 Give to my dear church that we builded together, my best, 
 best love, and to my pastor and the dear, dear Sunday School, 
 my best, best love. 
 
 These last months were filled with suffering, but 
 with a cheer and a joy that was characteristic of his 
 spirit. It was a benediction to care for him, and when, 
 after lingering days of unconsciousness the spirit was 
 freed, the world mourned with those whose hearts were 
 sore and broken, and expressions of sympathy and 
 appreciation and tender devotion came from men and 
 women who felt that his contribution to life had been so 
 much richer and deeper and more far-reaching than he 
 had ever realized. 
 
 The day before his spirit fled, a beautiful tribute 
 was paid him by T. Howard Wilson: 
 
 LINES TO BURDETTE 
 By T. Howard Wilson 
 
 He kept the world in leash with sunny talk 
 
 A sweet philosopher of smile and fun, 
 He was a comrade of the little folk, 
 
 Who live alway beneath the good warm sun; 
 Quaint twists he gave to words that kindled joy, 
 
 No sombre thing could in his presence thrive, 
 A man in whom was never lost the boy 
 
 However thick the darkling shades that strive 
 To lure from master truths that open lie 
 
 In fine simplicity. With vision clear 
 
 399 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 He traced the mystic labyrinths of sky 
 And Earth and saw no thing with eyes of fear. 
 
 Those bitter words that scape the tongues of men, 
 Wild jargon of the race that scar with pain, 
 
 The dregs of hate, were shut without his ken, 
 His thoughts fell on the world like gentle rain. 
 
 But now he treads the wine press all alone; 
 
 And yet, within the valley where he lies, 
 Methinks a seraph band in joyous tone 
 
 Uplifts a welcome paean to the skies 
 And round him angel thoughts from far and near 
 
 Come fluttering like wafted asphodels 
 To soothe his fevered brow with calm and cheer, 
 
 While flower spirits swing their tinkling bells. 
 And if, and if the voyage soon must come 
 
 From sphere of light to light of other spheres, 
 We ll keep his kindly humor as a chum 
 
 To walk with us adown the falling years. 
 
 400 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 BEFORE this record is closed and the final 
 tribute is made I feel that there should be set 
 down more intimate glimpses of the burning 
 fire of the spirit which has been so constantly 
 revealed in the preceding pages. In the close rela 
 tionships of home the assertion can be made with all 
 truth and no reservations, that just as Mr. Burdette 
 gave expression of it to the public on every occasion, so 
 he revealed his wonderful spirit in the innermost sacred- 
 ness of family life. There was little reaction of spirit, so 
 often credited to temperamental people. If there was, 
 the hour alone with his own soul and with God con 
 quered it. We, who knew and loved him best, always 
 revelled in that sweetness and tenderness which he so 
 peculiarly and abundantly possessed. 
 
 This may not have been always true, for it was but 
 natural that a temperament as quick, active and virile 
 as his should sometimes "be hot with temper unre 
 strained" and his brothers and sisters recall that as a 
 boy he "would fight at the drop of the hat and if it 
 did not drop he would see that it did". During the 
 army days his anger strengthened his courage to fight 
 and not until the after-war years had schooled him 
 fully in self control was he able, "through the grace of 
 God which overcometh all things/ to turn to service 
 this passion which had sometimes almost mastered him. 
 He always expressed his positive belief that humor 
 was so close to pathos they could not be separated, and 
 used the life of Charles Lamb, one of the greatest of 
 
 26 401 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 humorists, to illustrate how true humor is born of 
 trouble and sorrow. In his own life was the setting of 
 this background, not only the memory of struggles 
 with early poverty, the grief over the loss of loved ones, 
 but the ever present tragedy of contest with a trouble, 
 or was it a disease? Not of the head or the heart surely, 
 but a disarrangement of the nervous system, aggravated 
 perhaps by fatigue from travel and over-work in his 
 profession. 
 
 At times, like many another genius, he turned in his 
 uncontrollable weakness to stimulant for solace. It 
 may be, who knows, his occasional stumbling by the 
 way in the earlier days chastened and so blessed him 
 with that glorified sympathy which in the later years 
 seemed to reach out from his very soul to protect and 
 help those similarly afflicted. Biographers as a rule 
 give us only the best from the lives of their heroes, but 
 I would be false to a sacred trust in recording the 
 greatest achievements in the life of my husband, if I 
 did not repeat in his own words the reply to a pleading 
 letter from an intimate friend, based on the thought 
 that the cure lay in his own will. 
 
 BRYN MAWR, Saturday morning. 
 DEAR MRS. M : 
 
 It was the thought of a friend, good and sincere and kind, 
 to write as you did. You see why I wanted to come home as 
 fast as steam and wheels could carry me. 
 
 All that you say I have thought of, not for a day and for 
 once and twice but for a long, long time and a thousand times. 
 They creep into my thoughts at my desk; they make thorny 
 a sleepless pillow; they come into my jests with bitter mockery 
 on the platform; while people are laughing at a man with a 
 heart so heavy and sore that his face is only a grotesque mask. 
 Think of these things? I would give anything in the world if 
 I could quit thinking of them long enough to get quiet and 
 rested. 
 402 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 Don t worry yourselves thinking about me. There will 
 be no more trouble anyhow for three months. The period is 
 as regular as the calendar. And the fall is like a man stepping 
 off a wall in the dark. There is no fear, no apprehension 
 beyond the dread that is constantly present until the step is 
 taken. He just steps off, and there is no use in his screaming 
 after that. 
 
 I didn t intend to say more than "thank you" with all 
 sincerity for your letter. But I have gone on and burdened 
 you with my troubles. I won t write you in this vein again. 
 I quit making promises long ago. The man who means them 
 the least makes them the most fluently. But I want to assure 
 you that I am not hopeless. I don t give up. I am sure that 
 I will overcome this, yet. I hope and pray and am strong in 
 my belief that the dreaded days will come sometime and pass 
 by without touching me. I am sure of this. 
 
 This is no secret of mine. All my family know of it. And 
 their patience and gentleness and tenderness make my own 
 condemnation the more terrible. But please God the morning 
 will dawn sometime. 
 
 Meanwhile, we must live and we must work at the only 
 thing I can do and go on in my light-hearted business of making 
 people laugh and assuring them that life is a bed of roses with 
 a counterpane of sunshine no wonder that the wise man of 
 old time said of laughter, " It is made." 
 
 Good-bye; God bless you for your kind words and the 
 friendly heart that prompted them. 
 
 Sincerely your friend, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 God s answer to our sincere prayers are often given 
 through human agencies and His answer to the constant 
 petition was finally fully given through the immediate 
 environment of comfortable surroundings, relief from 
 financial worry, an all-absorbing, continuous work to 
 do, sympathetic understanding and all-surrounding 
 love that daily gave strength to courage. 
 
 All this he felt deeply about, and as I sat by his 
 
 403 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 bedside at twilight, Sunday evening, August 23d, after 
 his three days of coma, he said: 
 
 I feel as Riley does I am anxious to see what Heaven is 
 like. I know this world, I have traveled over its lands and 
 seas I know what life here is, now I want to know what 
 Heaven is. It will be the greatest surprise I have ever had. 
 I have thought a great deal about it, preached about it, theor 
 ized about it and here I am with nothing left but to go to 
 Heaven, and I don t know what it will be like. Will there be 
 nothing but harp music there I have heard better orchestras 
 than that here. Will it be singing mostly feminine voices 
 with the volume left out that would not be perfect music. 
 And the robes our ideas are all ancient. Certainly the dear 
 Lord must have some modern idea. 
 
 But my darling, how will I find you? You and I must be 
 together. Our life has been so wonderful together, we have 
 had the same interests, we have walked side by side, we have 
 so loved and you who have been my good angel with healing 
 wings that have overshadowed me, heaven would not be 
 heaven without you by my side. 
 
 Many of the marked personal peculiarities of his 
 mature public years were but the natural development 
 of the boyish tricks and manners. His sister, writing 
 of his part in the early family life, says: 
 
 Rob and his whistle are indelibly connected in my memory. 
 And his son says: 
 
 many were the songs of the church which he hummed and 
 whistled while busy in his den. Siloam was one of his favorite 
 hymns. Many a summer s morning in the yesterdays of boy 
 hood have I watched him shaving while the strains of this old 
 hymn, sung by his own mother in the "days befo the wah" 
 when Peoria was a frontier city in the far west, was whistled 
 and sung alternately by him. 
 
 He nearly always whistled or sang before he arose 
 in the morning not only because he believed that one 
 
 404 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 should start the day in a happy frame of mind, but 
 because "it just did itself". This cheery spirit of him 
 was always good medicine for the household. 
 
 To have rollicked through life with a song and a 
 whistle and to have earned his living by talking and to 
 have never known he was tongue-tied until he was sixty- 
 one years old, was what he considered the greatest joke 
 of his life. 
 
 Mr. Burdette was passionately fond of music. His 
 poetic temperament was tried more by the sentiment 
 than by the technique. In speaking of his own accom 
 plishments once, he said: 
 
 I play the fiddle by note, ear and main strength, and to avoid 
 getting into deep water I never attempt any compositions that 
 have been written within the past seventy-five years. 
 
 He came of a family of nine children, four girls and 
 five boys, and his father used to speak of having just 
 enough for a quadrille set and a fiddler, and it is easy 
 to believe that "Bob" played many parts. Later 
 many of his own poems were set to music. "Alone", 
 "When my Ship Comes In" and for words of his, John 
 Philip Sousa wrote the music to "Reveille" in 1890. 
 
 A comment of his found among his notes reads: 
 
 The report of a Sunday meeting where they heard "The Star 
 Spangled Banner" and "Dixie". One called forth shouts and 
 hand clapping. The other the men stood up in silence and 
 uncovered heads. "Dixie" is a shout a rollick. "The Star 
 Spangled Banner" is a prayer. 
 
 Another personal peculiarity is revealed in a corre 
 spondence between him and a young newspaper woman 
 who was carrying on a campaign against the wearing of 
 mustaches. She had unwittingly taken the advice of 
 
 405 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 someone to write to the author of "The Rise and Fall of 
 the Mustache " for assistance and encouragement in 
 the highly exciting endeavor. His reply follows: 
 
 SUNNYCREST, PASADENA, 
 
 Christmas-tide, 1912. 
 MY DEAR "HELEN HOYT": 
 
 Alas, you have sounded the trumpet call for reinforcements 
 at the wrong camp. The man who told you didn t hear straight. 
 My "Rise and Fall of the Mustache" made its "fall" its glory. 
 
 I never had a razor touch my upper lip. I have worn hair 
 on it more than sixty-eight years. All the mighty men of 
 earth s generations have worn hair on their faces from the days 
 of Samson to the Emperor William. What would Barbarossa 
 look like without the big red beard growing down through the 
 stone table? Who would be afraid of Blackbeard with a 
 Richard-Harding-Davis bald face? What would Blue Beard 
 be with a shaven lip? Imagine a bare-faced Santa Glaus. 
 King David went to war to avenge the shaving of his ambassa 
 dors. The " oath on the beard " is as old as history. Moham 
 medans still swear by the "beard of the prophet". The Cecils, 
 Greshams, Raleighs, Drakes and Walsinghams of England were 
 bearded folks. All the royal houses of Europe today go 
 bearded like the bard. The cavalier beard marked the gentle 
 man. 
 
 "Votes for Women" and whiskers for men! We are deter 
 mined to keep something masculine that is all our own. " Side 
 boards" are already back into wear in England. Women, 
 priests and actors may go barefaced as they will. Real men 
 are going to wear hair on their faces. Germs? Statistics show 
 that bearded men live longer, have better teeth, less sore throat, 
 and stronger voices than baldfaced men. Hospital statistics 
 prove that not one case of masculine pneumonia in seventeen 
 has whiskers. And tuberculosis is sweeping the beardless 
 Indians off the earth. 
 
 Sorry I can t help you, daughter, but I stand by the bearded 
 monsters of my sex. 
 
 Cordially yours, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 406 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 The courage to be so "exceptional" was the same 
 kind of spirit that made him in his teens "swagger like 
 a dandy and tilt his hat over one ear". And yet the 
 pill-box cap and the setting-up exercises of the army 
 brought to the later years times when the military 
 bearing and the dignified "top hat" gave the impres 
 sion of a much larger man than five feet four would 
 measure. With all his courage he was a shy, timid man 
 in certain ways and it was said of him: 
 
 He had ever been a bashful boy, grievously tormented with his 
 hands and sore stricken with his feet in company and much 
 given to the sitting on the edges of chairs. 
 
 So strong were these habits of youth, I have many 
 and many a time seen him come onto a platform and 
 while waiting for the formal introduction, sit on the 
 edge of the chair, double up his fists and place them one 
 on top of the other with a little beating motion, rise and 
 walk to the front of the platform with an uncertain 
 tread, as if he was too shy to talk, while in the heart of 
 him he knew that before three sentences were uttered 
 his audience "would rise to my fly" and they would 
 rollick with him through two hours of lecture that 
 always left them better and happier, 
 
 In later years he had some peculiarities, which were 
 different from the ordinary minister. He seldom spoke 
 over twenty minutes and always put into his sermon 
 some dramatic turn which made the audience remember 
 it. For example, once he preached on the story of the 
 withered hand. All during the sermon he held one 
 hand and arm perfectly still and when he came to the 
 point where he quoted "stretch forth thy hand", he 
 lifted with dramatic effect that hand which for twenty 
 minutes he had held absolutely still. 
 
 407 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 It may not be unusual that a nature like his should 
 care little for money except for the comfort and freedom 
 it might bring that enabled him to be a better workman, 
 and that he might contribute the same to others. He 
 entered upon a great adventure once with never a 
 thought of financial possibilities. 
 
 His purse may not have had much but his heart was 
 full of hope and courage and devotion that compelled 
 success. When a young couple came to Mr. Burdette 
 once to be married and after the ceremony he discovered 
 they hadn t but fifty cents between them, he told them 
 to keep it and gave them a dollar, saying, " Go out and 
 get a little wedding supper. I know how it is myself". 
 
 While his earning ability was much above his fellow- 
 craftsmen, he was never a saver of money, and it slipped 
 from him more rapidly than it came. He comforted 
 himself with his usual philosophical humor when he 
 said: 
 
 I do not believe very much in saving anyhow. I once bent 
 my energies to the task of saving up a barrel of money, and 
 when I got it saved a man said he knew just the best place in 
 the world to plant it to make it grow, so I gave it to him and 
 he planted it. Planted it well, too ; away down below the frost 
 line. It is there yet. It may come up on resurrection day, 
 but I doubt it. And every time I think of it I cry. I wish 
 I had spent it myself. 
 
 And yet he was not given to spending money for 
 himself further than the usual necessities of life. His 
 chief concern was for others who had not his earning 
 capacity or who through misfortune were unequal to 
 meeting the demands of life. He helped in the educa 
 tion of various young people of his family and made 
 regular contributions for many years toward the care 
 and support of an invalid sister who survived him. He 
 408 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 was always a helpful brother to both brothers and 
 sisters and when sending checks he always made some 
 observation which to say the least was not an obvious 
 one: 
 
 I enclose a plaster for chilblains. Put it where it will do 
 the most good. 
 
 I enclose a little check as an advance agent of prosperity. 
 
 Another note: 
 
 I sent a V. for her Easter hat. A girl at her age likes these 
 things and gets blessed few of them. 
 
 On the other hand, he wrote to one of his sisters: 
 
 A retired grocer out here tried to collect one of or bills 
 about $85.00 from me a few weeks ago. He is slowly recovering 
 consciousness, but does not yet remember what hit him. 
 
 When going abroad once he entered into a contract 
 with a young man to furnish weekly letters for a syn 
 dicate he was running. Mr. Burdette did his part 
 often depriving himself of time for sight-seeing and 
 going to the expense of gathering information and illus 
 trations for the same. The young man paid him very 
 little money and some six years after when he sent him 
 $100, leaving a balance of $1300 still due, and saying 
 he acted on Mr. Burdette s advice and paid all his 
 other debts first, Mr. Burdette cancelled the rest of the 
 debt with the advice that he pay the rest to the Lord. 
 
 A Ventura paper printed the following, headed 
 "Bob Burdette s All Right": 
 
 In his opening remarks at the Commencement exercises 
 last Thursday night, he said in effect: 
 
 " I came to Ventura to lecture on this occasion from purely 
 commercial motives. I had intended and made a contract 
 with the Board of Trustees to that effect, to soak them for 
 seventy-five dollars for a lecture on Rainbow Chaser. But 
 when I heard the opening address of Prof. Kauffman, I immedi- 
 
 409 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 ately chopped ten dollars off the bill and then when I heard 
 Nat Brown in his splendid address and valedictory, I cut that 
 bill down just fifteen dollars more. So the trustees will get 
 this lecture for just fifty dollars." 
 
 This opening sally occasioned much merriment and was 
 taken as another of Burdette s witticisms. 
 
 On the way to his hotel with F. W. Baker, he said, "My 
 audience thought that was a joke, but I meant it." That he 
 was as good as his word was evidenced by the following letter 
 and statement received today by B. W. Dudley. 
 
 SUNNYCREST, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, 
 
 June 16, 1903. 
 MY DEAR MR. DUDLEY: 
 
 Yours of the 13th just received. All right, I enclose a 
 "Rainbow Chaser" to meet the requirements of the law. My 
 agreement with the Committee was for $75.00. But Ventura 
 has always been good to me, I am very fond of the people there, 
 and they gave me such a hearty reception and such a splendid 
 class to "graduate with" that I think I got some of my fee in 
 my welcome. 
 
 Cordially yours, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 STATEMENT 
 
 PASADENA, CALIFORNIA. 
 
 June 16th, 1903. 
 The Board of Trustees, Ventura High School 
 
 to 
 
 Robert J. Burdette, Dr. 
 To lecture on "Rainbow Chasers", Commencement 
 
 night $75.00 
 
 Credit, 
 
 By Enthusiastic Audience, Cordial Wel 
 come and Splendid Class 25 . 00 
 
 To Balance $50.00 
 
 And this in spite of the fact that his own accounts 
 were frequently in "red ink". Here is his own illustra 
 tion of this condition: A heavy sheet of paper with 
 410 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 caption in large fancy lettering in red ink " What do You 
 do with All Your Money? " Then in black ink a date 
 and amount of deposits. An itemized list of amounts 
 checked out, which is totaled in red ink, leaving a small 
 balance of $26.70. And in black ink, "I still owe 
 printer s bill $90.00 and Barker Bros. $56.65." Total 
 in red ink $146.65, and in fancy letters, "Aw, what s 
 the Use?" 
 
 On this is pasted a book that he had cut out of some 
 advertisement bearing on its cover "Where have My 
 Profits Gone?" Now this was just to please his own 
 fancy, for no one ever saw it, but for the same pleasure 
 and delight he spent time to illustrate with transferred 
 pictures or pen sketches, cards, letters to friends, book 
 inscriptions. He had a fancy for taking covers of old 
 publications like the Literary Digest and decorating 
 them with pictures clipped from other magazines, 
 which would illustrate the title he was to put on in 
 fancy lettering, such as "On the Ways" which meant 
 that the notes and clippings filed in this cover were in 
 dry dock to be set afloat when repaired or finished. 
 His genius for this was most unusual. I have known 
 him to write fifty or sixty titles for a book, a lecture or 
 an article, only one of which was to be used, but all of 
 them unusually striking and unique. 
 
 On a slip of paper stuck in one corner of the blotter 
 on his desk he wrote: 
 
 My Laundry bill down here I set 
 Lest I forget, Lest I forget! 
 Yours truly Robert J. Burdette. 
 
 This to remind him of something which certainly was 
 not laundry. On another bit of irregular paper, two 
 pieces pasted together, he had typed off records of what 
 he styled "Rise and Fall of the Birthday Weights of 
 
 411 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 R. J. B.", and these began with July 30, 1880, and came 
 down to January, 1914, the year he died, and that year 
 a record was made for every month up to a month before 
 he died, September 30th, 139 pounds. By a queer 
 coincidence which he noted, his greatest weight, 150 
 pounds, was the year he first came to California, the 
 year he next came to California and the year he finally 
 came out here to live. 
 
 It was his pleasure to remember his friends with 
 autographed copies of books, photographs, and cards, 
 the work of his mind and pen and in each case his 
 inscriptions were intimately personal, sincere and 
 never wholly formal. They would, if gathered together, 
 make a little volume of fragrant memories, but I quote 
 only a few at random: 
 
 From the same old friend in the same old place 
 To the young old friend with the sweet young face, 
 Nothing so young as the old and true 
 So the same old love I send to you. 
 
 In a book entitled, "How to Live on Twenty-four 
 Hours a Day", he wrote: 
 
 To my busy Little Wife, who shows em how to do it on 
 48 hours a day, with a Christmas kiss from her Lazy Old 
 Husband. 
 
 In a book sent as a Christmas gift to the President, 
 he wrote the following inscription: 
 
 To 
 
 Woodrow Wilson 
 Head Master 
 
 of the 
 Greatest National School on Earth 
 
 Full of 
 
 Boys and Girls 
 Good, Bad and Indifferent; 
 White, Red, Yellow, Brown and Black 
 412 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 A Very 
 
 Rainbow of Humanity 
 
 Presaging Clear Weather and a Beautiful Tomorrow 
 Restless; Eager; Turbulent and Tractable 
 
 This 
 
 With All Cheery Christmas Greeting 
 And All Loyal Affection 
 
 From One of His 
 Republican Boys, who is trying Hard to Be Good 
 
 But Hasn t yet got caught at it. 
 
 With the earnest Hope that the New Year will be 
 
 Even Better than the Old 
 
 Very Respectfully and Most Cordially 
 
 In a book which he purchased for himself, entitled, 
 "The Dawn of the World ", is this: 
 
 To my faithful Old Comrade Myself : With whom I first 
 saw the dawn of the world, and in whose constant companion 
 ship I am now watching its sunset this, with the affectionate 
 greetings of Robert J. Burdette. 
 
 He had a fashion of terse, epigrammatic and force 
 ful expression of his ideas that got to the heart of his 
 subject in a line or two, for example, in a letter to a 
 clerical friend who had written some observations of 
 California, he said: 
 
 I perceive in your pleasant notes on California you do not 
 consider that numerical increase is an infallible indication of the 
 spiritual life of the church. Neither do I. Nor, on the other 
 hand, do I consider a steady decline in numbers an indication 
 of the great powers of grace. So we are both happy. 
 
 Written under a photograph of his: 
 
 Some people are like carpet tacks they mean the most 
 mischief when they point upwards. Honestly yours, Robert 
 J. Burdette. 
 
 413 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 And on the back of a photograph sent to his son in 
 the early nineties, is this inspiring bit of verse, "Com 
 rades": 
 
 Comrade of mine when the way is long 
 We ll cheer the trail with a marching song; 
 When the battle breaks at the bugle call 
 We ll lock our shields in a fighting wall, 
 And strike good blows in a common might, 
 I to the left and you to the right. 
 When the twilight shade on the hills is bent, 
 We ll sit in the door of our evening tent 
 And talk of the joys of Long Ago, 
 And Tomorrow s hopes in the after-glow, 
 When the midnight s stars in the skies are set, 
 And the fire burns low and the embers fret, 
 We ll sleep on the down of a hard fought field, 
 On the velvet rest of a dented shield, 
 And rest till the bugle shall call away 
 To the nobler work of a longer day. 
 
 In a book given to his nurse two weeks before he 
 died, he wrote his last inscription: 
 
 In the twilight of a friendship made tender by the shadows 
 of farewell and with many memories of your constant care, 
 most affectionately your friend, Robert J. Burdette. 
 
 He loved to call his friends by names that he him 
 self attached to them and they became a cherished 
 memory of these friends. Grace Hortense Tower, a 
 newspaper woman whom Mr. Burdette afterwards 
 married to John T. Warren, of Honolulu, wrote: 
 
 I can never forget the way he looked when he called me 
 "Daughter" nor the sweetness of his smile when he used to 
 call me by the name he gave me, " The Little Girl in the Corner." 
 
 His sister Mary he called "Little Dorrit" early in 
 life, and later, " Burdock " after characters in books 
 
 414 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 that he fancied. For the same reason he called his 
 sister Anna, "Jo" after Jo in "Little Women". He 
 called his own son, when a small boy, "The Prince" 
 and himself to his son as "Zebsee". My son, Roy, he 
 always called "buddie" and Roy s wife Helen, he early 
 named "Blossom" and never called her by any other 
 name. She in turn called him "Daddy-Bob-o-link" 
 as she delighted to call me "Jonquil Mother". These 
 intimate family names seemed to hold for him a sweet 
 ness of affectionate devotion that was the very essence 
 of his heart life. 
 
 For no other name did he so let his fancy run riot 
 as my own. Not more than half a dozen times in our 
 years together do I remember of his calling me or writing 
 of me by my given name, Clara. Most of them were 
 endearing names, for which he was past master for 
 creating and cannot be listed here, but are very sweet 
 to the memory as the years glide past. The year before 
 we were married he came to California, and at the 
 entrance to my home was a large bed of fragrant white 
 violets, and from that moment he called me "Violet"; 
 marking my silver "Violet", writing his poems to that 
 name and idealizing my life by the white violets. 
 
 In turn, not only his own boys, but many, many 
 other young people called him "Daddy" with an 
 affection that he used to declare "made the old man a 
 boy again". As is frequently the case with public 
 men, his name was sometimes used for commercial 
 purposes, as when they named a cigar after him, and 
 the South affectionately called a racing horse, 
 "Robert J." 
 
 Naturally he loved much more the "Bob Burdette 
 Club" of boys, a group of grade boys in Des Moines, 
 Iowa, who organized in 1896, with their aim, "To keep 
 
 415 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 our own hearts glad and make some other heart glad 
 every day". The name was chosen after the teacher 
 had told them "The Story of Rollo" as given in a 
 lecture by "the funny man, Robert J. Burdette". 
 The name was soon shortened to "The Bobs" and as 
 
 A BUBDETTE THANKSOIVING PROCLAMATION. 
 
 416 
 
MRS. ROBERT J. BURDETTE 
 
 "Viokt" 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 the boys grew older, they began bringing Mr. Burdette 
 to Des Moines to lecture for them. The last time he 
 went for them his lecture on "The Rainbow Chaser" 
 made enough money for them to furnish their club 
 house and pay $125 into the building fund for a new 
 church. 
 
 This message was received from them: 
 
 From Honolulu, China and the Islands of the Sea, always 
 The Bobs passed on the loving, kindly influence of their Patron 
 Saint, and when he went on into the sunset glow, the men who 
 had crowned him twenty years before, bared their heads and 
 reverently laid their roses of boyish love and manly allegiance 
 at the shrine of his memory. 
 
 He loved most of all the babies that admiring parents 
 had given his name to, forty-two of whom bore his name 
 in one form or another when he passed on. Even 
 since then there have been parents with fragrant 
 memories and appreciation in their hearts who have 
 called their little ones by his name. 
 
 One distant relative there is who early named her 
 self Bob, because of her affection for him. And one 
 stately woman there is, fine, regal and lovely, now in 
 her widowed robes, who was to have been called after 
 him, if she had been a boy, but being little sister instead, 
 she was nicknamed "Bob". And when in later years 
 she came to California to be married in one of the 
 beautiful homes of Southern California, to a man as 
 tall and handsome as herself, they built a little dais 
 for Mr. Burdette to stand on when he performed the 
 ceremony, that he might be as he said, "as high as her 
 heart". 
 
 There was also named for him a little Kiowa 
 Indian, "Robert Burdette Spotted Horse," whom 
 he afterwards helped to educate and who wrote to him, 
 
 27 417 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 made bead hatbands for him, with Mr. Burdette s 
 name woven in them, and sent him cards and bits of 
 remembrance. Under date of December 5, 1916, he 
 wrote me from Rainy Mountain School: 
 
 GOTEBO, OKLAHOMA. 
 
 I am now in the sixth grade in school and I am doing my 
 best and trying to learn. I hope I will grow up to be a good 
 man and help my people on the Jesus road, and I will ask you 
 to pray for me and all the rest of the children here at the school 
 and also the old people at home 
 
 Names of people in general it was difficult for him 
 to recall, but incidents and faces were always "in the 
 pictures" of his memory. A remarkable test of this 
 was the fact that while pastor of Temple Church, he 
 would stand at the door after service and greet the 
 immense congregation and there would pass before 
 him strangers from all over the United States. They 
 had but to mention the town or city they came from 
 and he would immediately recall some incident or 
 person whom he saw when lecturing there many years 
 before. 
 
 He had a retentive faculty that was the marvel of 
 all who heard him lecture, preach or quote without 
 notes that which he had written, passages of Scripture 
 at length, poems and standard authors. The following 
 from a newspaper will illustrate: 
 
 Speaking of Dr. Burdette reminds me of an occasion of those 
 old newspaper days that revealed an insight into the humorist s 
 memory that will always cling to me. 
 
 It appears that Dr. Burdette was to be one of the speakers 
 at a rally of Pasadena citizens called to discuss some phase of 
 city improvement. A platform was erected in a lot on South 
 Fair Oaks Avenue, just east of Colorado. 
 
 I called Dr. Burdette on the telephone and asked him if it 
 would be possible to secure an advance copy of the speech he 
 intended making that evening. 
 418 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 "Sure you can, son/ he replied in that cheery manner of 
 his. " Just send a messenger for it by noon and I will have it 
 all written out for you." 
 
 Promptly at noon the messenger appeared at Dr. Burdette s 
 home on South Orange Grove Avenue and secured the manu 
 script. Dr. Burdette, the good old soul, had typewritten it 
 himself and at various points in the written speech he had 
 inserted the words " applause", "laughter", etc. This struck 
 me rather unusual at the time, so I resolved to take the advance 
 copy of the speech to the meeting and follow the words of the 
 humorist to see how correctly he had surmised the feelings of 
 the crowd. 
 
 Strange as it may seem, Dr. Burdette did not deviate one 
 single word from the copy of his address, which I had spread 
 out before me. Wherever the word "applause" occurred there 
 the audience applauded. Wherever he had "laughter" the 
 audience laughed. 
 
 It was not an address he had ever delivered before. He 
 had written it that morning and yet he followed it with a 
 fidelity that was positively marvelous. It was an insight into 
 the brilliant mind of the humorist that should be recorded 
 when his biography is written. All the world loved Bob 
 Burdette and he loved all the world. 
 
 The Holy Land fired his imagination as no other 
 bit of country ever had and his pen seemed dipped in 
 poetry, beauty and reverence. His letters to his 
 father who had always been an ardent Bible student, 
 were filled with beautiful detailed description and with 
 reference to Bible passages by book and chapter and 
 verse illustrating the scenes we were visiting. His 
 memory was saturated with the Scriptures and there 
 was rarely a topic he approached, no matter what was 
 its nature, that he did not draw upon Scripture for 
 text, topic or illustration. 
 
 Years before, using this same familiarity with and 
 memory of the Scriptures, he wrote an article concerning 
 "Ingersoll s Creed": 
 
 419 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 With this title some one sends us a little tract, containing 
 epigrammatic expressions from Col. Robert G. Ingersoll s 
 latest lecture, "What must we do to be saved?" We have 
 read the tract and we have read the entire lecture. If this is 
 truly Ingersoll s creed, the colonel isn t so far out of the way. 
 He is coming around, maybe. He manages to get considerable 
 scripture into his creed, as he sets it forth. There is lots of 
 hope, in fact there is a great deal of certainty for the colonel. 
 We subjoin a few articles of this great man s creed, just to show 
 from what book he got his declaration of faith. 
 
 "Honest industry is as good as pious idleness," says the 
 Colonel. Well, that s all right. That s orthodox. The 
 Bible says the same thing and said it long before the colonel 
 thought of it. 
 
 "Faith without works is dead." 
 
 " Christ believed the temple of God to be the heart of man." 
 Ingersoll. 
 
 Yes, that s orthodox, too. We "must worship him in the 
 spirit". "Know ye not that ye are the temple of the Holy 
 Ghost?" 
 
 " If I go to heaven I want to take my reason with me." 
 Ingersoll. 
 
 Of course, and so you will, "for now we see through a glass 
 darkly; but there face to face; now I know in part; but then 
 I shall know even as I am known." I Corinthians, xiii, 12. 
 
 "Fear is a dagger with which hypocrisy assassinates the 
 soul." Ingersoll. 
 
 That is good gospel, and "perfect love casteth out fear". 
 
 "If I owe Smith ten dollars, and God forgives me, that 
 doesn t pay Smith." Ingersoll. 
 
 Correct you are; the prayer of Christianity is "forgive us 
 our debts as we forgive our debtors ". " Owe no man anything." 
 
 "Reason is the light of the soul,and if you haven t the right 
 to follow it, what have you the right to follow?" Ingersoll. 
 
 "Yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my 
 understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, 
 than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue. Brethren, 
 be not children in understanding; howbeit in malice be ye 
 children, but in understanding, be men." I Corinthians, xiv, 
 19,20. 
 
 420 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 " If you go to hell, it will be for not practicing the virtues 
 which the Sermon on the Mount proclaims." Ingersoll. 
 
 That s all orthodox. " If ye know these things, happy are 
 ye if ye do them." 
 
 " The men who saw the miracles all died long ago. I wasn t 
 acquainted with any of em." Ingersoll. 
 
 Same way with the men who saw Servetus burned. But 
 the colonel most firmly believes that Servetus was burned. 
 
 "A little miracle now, right here just a little one would 
 do more toward the advancement of Christianity than all the 
 preaching of the last thirty years." Ingersoll. 
 
 " If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they 
 be persuaded though one rose from the dead." Luke xvii, 31. 
 
 "If there is a God in the universe he will not damn an 
 honest man." Ingersoll. 
 
 "A false balance is an abomination unto the Lord; but a 
 just weight is his delight." Proverbs, xi, 1. 
 
 "There is only one true worship, and that is the practice 
 of justice." Ingersoll. 
 
 "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar s 
 and unto God the things which be God s." Luke xx, 25. 
 
 "God will not damn a good citizen, a good father, or a 
 good friend." Ingersoll. 
 
 Certainly not; nor any good man. "A good man sheweth 
 favour, and lendeth; he will guide his affairs with discretion. 
 Surely, he shall not be moved for ever; the righteous shall be 
 held in everlasting remembrance." Psalms cxii, 5, 6. 
 
 "Study the religion of the body in preference to the religion 
 of the soul. A healthy body will give a healthy mind, and a 
 healthy mind will destroy superstition." Ingersoll. 
 
 That explains why the Indians have no superstitions. 
 
 "People who have the smallest souls, make the most fuss 
 about saving them." Ingersoll. 
 
 Of course, Colonel, they are the hardest kind to save. 
 
 "I will never ask God to treat me any fairer than I treat 
 my fellow men." Ingersoll. 
 
 Well, that s perfectly orthodox. "For if ye forgive men 
 their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; 
 but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your 
 Father forgive your trespasses." "For with what judgment 
 
 421 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, 
 it shall be measured to you." 
 
 " Upon the shadowy shore of death, the sea of trouble casts 
 no wave." Ingersoll. 
 
 The colonel must have been singing that good old hymn 
 "When I can read my title clear," in which occur the lines: 
 
 "And not a wave of trouble roll 
 Across my peaceful breast." 
 
 In a response to a request for his favorite Bible text 
 he wrote: 
 
 What is my favorite Text? 
 
 When the day is raw and stormy, I want a cloak, warm and 
 storm-proof, and I snuggle into it and draw it around me like a 
 "garment of praise". When the day is bitter cold, the sunny 
 side of a great rock, with the outlook to the south is my favorite, 
 and "the Rock that is higher than I" is my shelter. When 
 the way of the pilgrimage is dusty and hot, I love a shaded path 
 close beside the windings of the river; I love to hear the murmur 
 of "the fountain of living waters". When I am hungry, a little 
 passing shower of manna pleases me as well as any thing, with 
 the promise of "the hidden manna" in the day of overcoming. 
 
 When I am filled "the full soul loatheth the honey comb", 
 and a little exercise, such as climbing the Hill Difficulty or 
 running with Patience a hard sprint in the race that is set before 
 me is good for me. When I am tired, I long for an arbor of 
 rest I want to "lie down in green pastures", until my soul 
 is restored. Going down the dangerous slopes I want a pil 
 grim s staff upon which to lean. 
 
 When there are giants in the way, I want a sword " a right 
 Jerusalem blade", and some One to "teach my fingers to fight". 
 Sometimes I am faint hearted and frightened, then I want a 
 trumpet blast that will stiffen the sinews of my soul, like the 
 trumpets of Gideon. Then another day I have fallen among 
 thieves, I am sore hurt, and I need words that are healing balm. 
 One time I need to be coaxed ; the next day I have to be com 
 manded. Today I must be restrained and feel the pull of the 
 rein and the grip of the curb. Tomorrow I must have whip 
 and spur. On my stupid days I must be patiently enlightened 
 
 422 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 "line upon line, precept upon precept". On other days when 
 I know too much, I must be cautioned and reproved. My 
 favorite text? Oh, my children, you might as well ask me 
 which is my favorite eye. Whichever one I might happen to 
 lose, of course. 
 
 He always found a text in everything and these 
 suggestions he noted down to use at some future time. 
 For example, standing in a Japanese temple one day, 
 he wrote: 
 
 Buddha s doctrine of "The Path" our own Indian expres 
 sion " The Jesus Road ". That is simple and plain it is Jesus 
 own teaching, "I am the Way". 
 
 Frequently these suggestive notes were not written 
 but he sketched with pen and ink illustrations of 
 thought which in a few strokes visualized what it would 
 have taken paragraphs to have written. 
 
 One of his assumed privileges was the coining of 
 words, which led him to say: 
 
 I once coined a name way back in 1876, for one of my 
 so-called humorous characters Bilderback. I put the Bilder- 
 back family in jocose print for several years. One night, about 
 1887, I lectured in Salem, N. J., and told one of my Bilderback 
 stories. The audience was convulsed with more mirth than 
 the story called for. After the lecture I was introduced to 
 about a dozen Bilderbacks, who enjoyed my story more than 
 any one else. 
 
 He had a peculiar intimate way, in his early writing, 
 of addressing advice to "My boy" or "My son" which 
 attracted and gripped the interest of the young readers. 
 
 Remember, son, [he wrote] that the world is older than you 
 are by several years; that for thousands of years it had been 
 so full of smarter and better young men than yourself that 
 their feet stuck out of the dormer windows; that when they 
 died the old globe went whirling on, and not one man in ten 
 millions went to the funeral. 
 
 Don t be too sorry for your father because he knows so 
 
 423 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 4 kit k<M 6^ / 
 TV* M A f V f*.J US - 
 
 VIVID IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 
 
 424 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 much less than you do. Remember the reply of Dr. Wayland 
 to the student of Brown University who said it was an easy 
 enough thing to make proverbs such as Solomon wrote. " Make 
 a few," tersely replied the old man. 
 
 The world has great need of young men, but no greater 
 than the young men have for it. Your clothes fit you better 
 than your father s fit him; they cost more money, and they 
 are more stylish; your mustache is neater; the cut of your 
 hair is better. But, young man, the old gentleman gets the 
 biggest salary, and his homely, scrambling signature on the 
 business end of a check will drain more money out of the bank 
 in five minutes than you could get out with a ream of paper 
 and a copper-plate signature in six months. 
 
 Again: 
 
 Remember, my boy, the good things in the world are 
 always the cheapest. Spring water costs less than corn whiskey ; 
 a box of cigars will buy two or three Bibles; a gallon of old 
 brandy costs more than a barrel of flour; a "full hand" at 
 poker often costs more in twenty minutes than a church sub 
 scription amounts to in three years; a state election costs more 
 than a revival of religion. 
 
 You can sleep in church every Sunday morning for nothing, 
 if you re mean enough to deadbeat your lodging that way, but 
 a nap in a Pullman car costs you $2.00 every time; 50 cents 
 for the circus, and a penny for the little ones to put in the 
 missionary box; $1.00 for the theater, and a pair of old trousers, 
 frayed at the end, baggy at the knees and utterly bursted as 
 to the dome, for the Michigan sufferers. 
 
 The dancing lady who tries to wear the skirt of her dress 
 under her arm and the waist around her knees, and kicks her 
 slippers clear over the orchestra chair every night gets $600 a 
 week, and the city missionary gets $500 a year, the horse-race 
 scoops $2000 the first day, and the church fair lasts a week, 
 works twenty-five or thirty of the best women in America 
 nearly to death and comes out $40 in debt. 
 
 And again: 
 
 Remember, my son, you have to work. Whether you 
 handle a pick or pen, a wheelbarrow or a set of books, digging 
 
 425 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 ditches or editing a paper, ringing an auction bell or writing 
 funny things, you must work. If you look around you, you 
 will see the men who are most able to live the rest of their lives 
 without work are the men who work the hardest. Don t be 
 afraid of killing yourself with overwork. It is beyond your 
 power to do that on the sunny side of 30. Men die sometimes, 
 but it is because they quit work at 6 P. M., and don t get home 
 until 2 A. M. It is the interval that kills you, my son. The 
 work gives you an appetite for your meals; it lends solidity to 
 your slumbers; it gives you a perfect and grateful appreciation 
 of a holiday. 
 
 There are young men who do not work, but the world is 
 not proud of them. It does not even know their names. It 
 simply speaks of them as "so-and-so s boys". Nobody likes 
 them. The great busy world does not know that they are there. 
 So find out what you want to be and do, and take off your coat 
 and do it. The busier you are, the less harm you will be apt 
 to get into, the sweeter will be your sleep, the brighter and 
 happier your holidays, and the better satisfied will all the world 
 be with you. 
 
 These illustrate also that his humor lay almost 
 wholly in his forms of expression and in an unexpected 
 collocation of ideas, the effect of which upon the reader 
 or hearer was cumulative. But through it all, he 
 maintained that "humor is but the garment of truth. 
 It is the combination of philosophy and truth which 
 makes humor. True humor delights women buffoon 
 ery shocks them. Men laugh at situations women at 
 sentiments." 
 
 "What s that, Dr. Burdette?" asked a young man 
 in his church study one day, pointing to a colored litho 
 graph of a washerwoman, framed and hung on the 
 wall. 
 
 "That, my boy, is an illustration that the popular heart 
 is on the right side," he said, with a smile. "Some years ago, 
 John A. Johnson was running for governor of Minnesota, and 
 426 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 some one threw it up to him that his mother had been a wash 
 woman. He admitted that she was, and that he had helped 
 her, when he was a boy. So they made this cartoon, and called 
 it the governor of Minnesota, and the man was elected by an 
 overwhelming majority, on the Democratic ticket, in a Repub 
 lican state." 
 
 "And what s that?" 
 
 That, my son, is the old story, For he s a jolly good fellow . 
 The young wife is sitting up waiting for him; the clock points 
 to 2 in the morning; she has brought out his slippers and 
 dressing gown, and has fallen asleep beside the evening lamp, 
 her head resting on the table. That, my son, is the strongest, 
 briefest sermon on the drink problem preached in many a day! 
 It is so awfully true that it is almost humorous in its ghastly 
 reality; for, as I told you, true humor is but a foil to give to 
 truth its true proportions." 
 
 He was often urged by his literary intimates to write 
 more for permanent literature. Melville Delancy Law- 
 son (Eli Perkins) wrote years ago: 
 
 Before you go away, Bob, before you are translated to 
 Moses and Elijah you ought to collect all the best things you 
 ever wrote into one or more volumes and leave it to the boys 
 and girls growing up. 
 
 The reason he did not do this may possibly be found 
 in a reply he once made to Samuel L. Clemens (Mark 
 Twain). We visited them once when they were living 
 outside of London, and as our two boys and their two 
 daughters played tennis, Mrs. Clemens and I chatted, 
 and Mr. Clemens and Mr. Burdette went off into 
 another room for a visit. 
 
 Finally Mr. Clemens said, "Bob, do you know what 
 
 a fool you have been all your life". "Yes, Mark, 
 
 I reckon I do. No one but the dear Lord knows that 
 better than I do. But in what particular respect do 
 you mean, Mark?" Mr. Clemens replied, "You have 
 
 427 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 gone around the world all these years just lecturing to 
 folks who forget you tomorrow. Why haven t you 
 written books and charged em two dollars and a half 
 apiece for them?" "Well, I ll tell you, Mark," said 
 Mr. Burdette, "I suppose its because I care more for 
 folks than I do for the two dollars and a half". 
 
 In that you have the key-note of his life. 
 
 While he did not preserve his writings in book form 
 to any extent, he did the marvelous and unusual thing 
 of preserving his writings in a dozen scrapbooks of 
 clippings from the Burlington Hawkeye, Brooklyn 
 Eagle, Los Angeles Times, and his diaries were reli 
 giously kept from the beginning of his lecture career 
 up to two weeks before he died, in which are found 
 detailed accounts of every phase of the activities which 
 crowded his life. These records are greatly enriched 
 by sketch and illustration with his pen, and com 
 ments that run through the full gamut of his emo 
 tions, his gifts and his characteristic outlook on life. 
 
 Nothing was ever too great for him to undertake 
 for a friend, and yet it was in little ways, little thought- 
 fulnesses, inexpensive gifts, the helpfulness that only 
 required thought, a moment of time and the loving 
 spirit, by which he endeared himself to the hosts of 
 people who felt he was their special friend. When in 
 Europe for a few weeks vacation he occupied his spare 
 moments in writing souvenir postal cards to members 
 of his family and of his church. He delighted 500 
 people therewith one year, dipping his pen in love as 
 he wrote. Later he said, "The only reason I did not 
 write 500 more is because I did not stay away long 
 enough". He passed his sixty-third birthday while 
 away on this trip, and solemnly declared, "It shall 
 never occur again". 
 
 428 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 In a desk basket was always a department where he 
 kept envelopes addressed to some special friends. From 
 time to time he slipped into these envelopes a poem, 
 a church calendar, a clipping, and finally a few lines 
 of personal greeting. One who knew of this habit 
 could realize how constantly he kept his friends in 
 mind and how enthroned they were in his heart. As 
 a result of these little acts there grew up many warm 
 friendships. A copy of a letter he wrote many years 
 ago came back to him because it was so characteristic 
 of his great heart: 
 
 IOWA FALLS, IOWA. 
 
 To the Postmaster: I mail a pkg to-night addressed to "the 
 Two Little Misses Elliot" which is all the address I know for 
 them. They are the two little girls who sat on camp stools in 
 the front of my audience tonight. Their mother is a widow I 
 understand. And I know you will oblige me by forwarding 
 the parcel to the children. 
 
 Sincerely yours, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 and "the Two Little Misses Elliot" were on his mailing 
 list through all the years and became treasured friends. 
 His friendships were not confined to those of his own 
 creed or political party. No one could have been more 
 solicitous during Mr. Burdette s illness than was 
 Bishop Conaty of the Catholic Church, and the Presi 
 dent of the Los Angeles Federation of Catholic Societies, 
 who wrote: 
 
 In common with all who know you, or have heard of you, 
 whether members of your own congregation or not, or even of 
 our good old Celtic Club, I have watched with anxiety the 
 reports of your illness and cannot refrain from expressing my 
 sympathy and sincere hopes for your speedy restoration to 
 health. Los Angeles can ill afford to lose the services of such 
 
 429 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 an able champion of all good causes and of Truth as he sees it. 
 God have you in his keeping and hasten your convalescence is 
 the prayer of 
 
 Your sincere friend, 
 
 A. E. LYNCH. 
 
 His love for humanity crowned it all, with a dis 
 tinction he made between "liking" and "loving". 
 
 I cannot like some men; their boorish ways; 
 
 Their coarse vulgarities; their love of show; 
 Their purse-proud vanities; the shame of their self-praise; 
 
 Their crying faults. But this full well I know 
 I do not need to "Like" the things that show outside, 
 
 But I can "Love" the soul for which Christ died. 
 
 Gregarious as his nature seemed to be, there were 
 times when for very weariness of spirit he sought soli 
 tude in a peculiar manner, and once he wrote of it: 
 
 Do you know, I love to run away from the town, and get 
 away from the people, the noisy, chattering, talking people, 
 although I love them, and stroll about in the cemetery? I like 
 to get away from the live men and seek the companionship of 
 the dead ones. I believe I love the dead people. It is good to 
 stroll about among the tombstones and look down upon the 
 graves of them that sleep. You seem to catch some of the sweet 
 quiet of their dreamless repose, and as you read their names 
 and think of them all this grim, nameless fear of death passes 
 away. 
 
 One day away out in Blissfield, Michigan, I left the little 
 town dozing away in the early March afternoon and strolled 
 out to the acre where the sleepers await the resurrection dawn. 
 I glanced at the stones as I passed along the little mounds and 
 wondered that people should live so long, for most of them 
 seemed to have dropped to sleep in good old age far down the 
 quiet afternoon of life, like an old man falling asleep in his arm 
 chair watching the fading sunlight die away and the creeping 
 shadows falling over his meadows and brown stubble fields. 
 How tenderly you feel toward the dead you have never known 
 before as you stand among them, 
 
 430 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 And if trouble of any kind ever shadowed his heart, 
 he waited until night and the stars came out and he 
 walked out or lay near a window where he could see 
 them, saying: 
 
 The stars! God s own stars. Whenever I am troubled 
 and perplexed when my heart aches and my faith is dim or 
 blind, I love to go out and look up at the stars. God s beautiful 
 stars. And if they are all there, calm, majestic, serene, each 
 in their place where God s finger put them a million years ago, 
 I say to my bewildered brain, or my troubled soul, " Be content. 
 He can take care of your little affairs." And the stars say to 
 any storm that may be raging in the narrow, shallow sea of my 
 little life, "Peace, be still," and there comes a calm the 
 Wonderful Stars! 
 
 What contrasts life holds! In 1863, writing of 
 "Camp near Yazoo Pass", Miss., to his sister, he 
 wrote: 
 
 I am sending $10.00. Would send more but I will need 
 money around where we are going in case of sickness wounds, 
 or any other misfortunes of war. It is awful hot, though the 
 woods are quite green. I found two violets in the marsh which 
 I intended sending to you, but they got themselves lost. 
 
 March 8, 1901, from Mount Carmel in Palestine, 
 he wrote: 
 
 The happy camping tour in Palestine is ended. . . . We 
 spent two days at "Sweet Galilee" and took a little ship and 
 sailed and rowed to Capernaum; walked by the Sea made for 
 ever sacred by the presence of Jesus; visited this part and 
 that; and as we climbed the long hill above Tiberias, cast 
 many longing looks back to the most beautiful lake on earth. 
 . . . This has been to me more than all the rest of the year s 
 journeying. It has not merely been a journey through wonder 
 ful places, but a beautiful ride nearly 200 miles through wild 
 flowers. One day at luncheon, between Nain and Galilee, I 
 walked away from the table about one hundred yards and 
 
 431 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 came back with thirteen varieties of wild-flowers. This land 
 is no desert. 
 
 Because of the generosity of Mr. Burdette s nature, 
 he was the recipient of more and varied requests for 
 assistance than it would seem possible could be directed 
 to any one man. These he responded to through the 
 long years of public service, whenever and however 
 possible. And he had the gratification of receiving an 
 unexpected amount of appreciation. Possibly he 
 prized most of all the words of heartfelt gratitude 
 for some act or word of his which had been given 
 unsolicited. Some of the appreciative words from 
 James Whitcomb Riley have already been quoted, 
 and many more might be added. Dr. James Hedley, 
 a well-known lecturer, writing to him, recognized with 
 appreciation this kindly spirit toward a compatriot: 
 
 It has been in my heart for some time to write you a letter 
 of earnest thanks for the many gracious and kindly things you 
 have said of me and my work. Hither and yon, good people 
 tell me of it. Bless your big wide heart, always open and warm 
 as a June day. It has room in it for every creature. Your 
 words and your life are twins and that is the highest expression 
 of the character and work of a good man. I always enjoy 
 following you because you leave a taste sweet as honey, in the 
 mouths of all men. 
 
 A man employed in the mechanical department of 
 the Burlington Hawkeye, when Mr. Burdette first went 
 to the paper, treasured in his memory this appreciation 
 expressed three years after Mr. Burdette passed on: 
 
 Mr. Burdette s writing in the paper, and his personality, 
 was the greatest factor in the building up of the Hawkeye. 
 In Dickens "Great Expectations" there is this paragraph: 
 "And now the very breath of the beans and the clover whis 
 pered to my heart that the day must come when it would be 
 432 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 well for my memory that others walking in the sunlight might 
 be softened as they thought of me." And I know of nothing 
 that will better express the feeling and sentiment of every man 
 that was associated with him on the Hawkeye than that their 
 "hearts are softened" as they think of him. 
 
 Strickland Gillilan, one of the Press Humorists, 
 in a letter to Mr. Burdette, expresses the tenderness 
 with which he was held in the hearts of the younger 
 generations. This is especially interesting because it 
 is not only the writer s tribute but the appreciation of 
 the Press Humorists of America: 
 
 MY DEAR BOY: 
 
 There there, now. Don t think I m flippant or fresh. 
 I m not. To me, and to the other boys who play about your 
 knees in the fragrant field of humor and the finer things (but 
 are there any finer things than pure humor?) you will never be 
 aught except that bigger boy who has been further afield than 
 we. He has been along the path of perennial boyhood further 
 than we now think we may ever dare to go. He has found 
 where the hornets have built their nests, but he doesn t tell us. 
 With one of his own twinkling eyes carefully cocked on the 
 hornet s gray nest he shows us, away over yonder, where the 
 grass is softest; where the road is smoothest; where the clover- 
 blooms along the pathway are reddest and fullest of that which 
 tempts the bees. 
 
 And we miss the hornets wondering why, but loving the 
 good big boy who showed us where the pleasures were. Our 
 big boy friend has found where the deepest and coolest and 
 sandiest-bottomed swimming-holes are, and where it is safe to 
 dive from a sycamore limb; he also knows where the bad boy 
 put the thorns of honey-locust in the slide. He knows that 
 just after we climb some of the highest hills there is the finest 
 view and the best stretches of good going. That is why he 
 smiles as he sees us tagging along over those places and we 
 smile because he does; which makes the hard climbs easier 
 for us. 
 
 The big boy is just now standing on the top of a ridge that 
 
 looks to us like the summit of all things. To him it doesn t 
 
 28 433 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 seem so. But he is smiling. As he smiles he holds out his 
 strong, helpful hand and says: "Come on, boys, come on. 
 This isn t the top you think you re seeking, and I can t even 
 see it from here. But I ve found out something as I came 
 along, and it s so good I can t wait till you get up to me to tell 
 it to you. I ve found out that what we think we re striving 
 for isn t it at all. It s something infinitely better, infinitely 
 more lasting I can see that from here, but so can you from 
 where each of you is by looking up". 
 
 He knows where all the orchards are that let some of their 
 apples hang over the roadside fence and he knows which 
 orchard owners keep dogs. He knows the place where he 
 slipped once and pretty nearly fell, perhaps, and when he comes 
 to that place he tells the boys a tender story that makes them 
 laugh and cry both at once so that they follow him around the 
 slippery spot without knowing they have been led. He knows 
 all these things, and the boys love him for knowing them, and 
 are happier and more hopeful as they say to one another: 
 " See, he has been along the road further than we and he seems 
 even happier than when he started. It is a good road and the 
 trip has paid him. He has found more of sunshine than of 
 cloud in it. He has found more of gentle warmth than of 
 withering cold in it; he has found more of beauty than of ugli 
 ness in it; and the simple, artless joys of childhood that we 
 find so sweet and have feared might wear out and pall upon us, 
 are still sweet to him. It is a goodly journey for is not our 
 Big Brother evidence of it? 
 
 And we are all happier much happier because you have 
 lived; all the happier because, as you have perhaps forgotten 
 I told you in your own beautiful home, you have not played 
 the Merry Andrew but have reserved in your own heart and 
 soul the right to be serious; because you have admitted that 
 the rose was inevitably accompanied by the thorn, but have 
 ever insisted that the sweetness of the rose far outweighed the 
 sharpness of the thorn. That s why we love our Big Brother 
 and that s why our lives are so much brighter and our work 
 so much easier from the fact that he has lived. 
 
 So many young men might have duplicated this 
 appreciation. From a young newspaper man: 
 
 434 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 Beloved pastor and esteemed friend, I see from the news 
 dispatches that your face is turned toward the setting sun, and 
 I want to express again, as I have tried to from time to time 
 in the years past, my heartfelt appreciation to you of the chance 
 which you first gave me, almost ten years ago, when I was 
 making the hard and seemingly unsuccessful struggle for recog 
 nition. I feel now, as I have always felt since you in your 
 kindliness and love first gave me my opportunity, that the 
 measure of success I have attained has been due entirely to 
 your friendship and aid at the critical point in my life. God 
 make happy and sunny the days that bring you closer to the 
 great river. 
 
 And this from a man of accomplishment: 
 
 The whirligig of time brings many surprises and I know 
 that you have not reached the time when surprises are no 
 longer unexpected but I am sure that you will wonder how I 
 can possibly associate you with such a work. Do you remember 
 (and of course you cannot, such is the multitude of letters you 
 receive) having acknowledged a letter of appreciation and 
 sympathy written in the summer of 1886 from an island in 
 Puget Sound, by a boy who was clearing a Government claim 
 and preparing himself for an eastern technical school? Your 
 letter in reply to this boy s note is as follows: 
 
 MY DEAR BOY: 
 
 Many thanks for your note. A word of encourage 
 ment heard in the dark, the grasp of the hand of a fellow 
 pilgrim whose face we have never seen, comes like a bene 
 diction to every man. This wonderful fellowship makes us 
 all stronger. 
 
 Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that 
 is in Christ Jesus, for the sake of the young men whose 
 lives you influence by daily contact; and lean hard upon 
 the arm of "Him that is able to keep you from falling". 
 In Him alone we find the strength and patience we all need. 
 Sincerely your friend, 
 
 ROBERT J. BURDETTE. 
 
 I well remember the day your letter came, and as I look 
 at it now, a mysterious emanation from the sheet brings back 
 
 435 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 the surroundings under which it was first read. The log cabin 
 in a clearing, a candle on a hewn table, and by it a blue-shirted 
 boy of 17 eagerly studying Ganot s physics, Ray s algebra and 
 Otto s French grammar. Home made weather instruments 
 were exposed and studied, and the self-imposed lesson of the 
 day tacked to the fir log for contemplation while sawing. 
 From that day, twenty-six years ago, to this, your letter has 
 been an inspiration to me, and my studies in climatology have 
 been continued ever since then, influenced by the friendly 
 hand held out at the critical period of my life. 
 
 From those whom he did not know personally, there 
 came messages like this: 
 
 You don t know me at all, but I thank God I know you very 
 well. In fact, I have been your friend for several years. I 
 have heard you lecture, have frequently heard you preach, 
 have read your books and newspaper clippings. These have 
 been a comfort and a joy to me more than words can tell. 
 You have done me good all these years. 
 
 Walt Mason, a man known to all newspaper readers 
 today, wrote to me personally in 1911 : 
 
 I hope your husband s health is better than it was a while 
 ago. I can t tell you how much affection I have for him, 
 although I have never seen him. He was the idol of my boy 
 hood. I had a pretty hard time of it then, working in a woolen 
 mill in a dreary Scotch village in Canada, and my happiest 
 hours were spent when the weekly paper came. It always 
 contained some funny stories from the Burlington Hawkeye, 
 and I used to read them and double up with glee, and set the 
 house afire, and scalp the cat. It seems to me that the besetting 
 sin of most American humorists is a fondness for caustic sar 
 casm. A humorist, above all other men, should be full of the 
 milk of human kindness. I am glad that Bob went into the 
 ministry, and I hope he says funny things in church. I can 
 see no reason why religion should be the funereal thing so many 
 preachers make it. Give my love to him. 
 
 And more recently, a man who years ago was 
 encouraged by Mr. Burdette to believe that there was 
 
 436 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 something better for him than the life of a pugilist, 
 wrote to me of the success of his publication, and that 
 his publishers had asked for another book, saying, he 
 knew how Dr. Burdette would rejoice in it were he 
 here, and he added, "God worked in the snow when 
 he made Robert J. Burdette he was a white man!" 
 Very touching was the appreciation, the devotion 
 and affection of General Harrison Gray Otis, owner and 
 editor of the Los Angeles Times, a man often misjudged 
 as to his motives and, because of his brusque and austere 
 manners, believed to be unappreciative and unsympa 
 thetic. General Otis once wrote: 
 
 DEAR MR. BURDETTE: You are a lovely friend, and you 
 swing a lovely pen, especially when you are writing to an old 
 friend. To be very candid with you more candid than I ever 
 was before in my life I am very fond of you, and I am a 
 profound admirer of your genius, your ability and your capacity 
 for doing things. I appreciate the little letter which you were 
 good enough to write me with your own hand; I appreciate it 
 beyond expression. I express my very sincere gratification 
 over the good opinion of the Times, and the conduct of the 
 Times, expressed by you, who are so good a judge. I some 
 times think, when mentally reviewing the past (which I haven t 
 time to do very of ten) , that I have been abused a "leetle" too 
 much but maybe not. It is the sore and serious misappre 
 hension under which so many minds labor that is annoying 
 and maddening. Misjudgment is the habit of so many people. 
 These things do not hurt, save when they take on the form of 
 an attempted impeachment of my good motives, my integrity, 
 and my character for patriotism as a citizen, independence as 
 an editor, and loyalty as a man. 
 
 I know you understand me, and I bless you for it. 
 
 The great battle in which we have been engaged for so 
 long a time, and out of which we are emerging triumphant, was 
 a battle provocative in the fullest degree of antagonisms bitter 
 industrial, political, sectarian, and even personal antagonisms 
 and for this reason the conflict has been fierce, intense and 
 implacable. 
 
 437 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 My great aspiration is to see the country industrially free; 
 to see liberty under law prevail everywhere; to see peace and 
 progress in the industries, hope and prosperity among the 
 wage earners, loyalty to the nation instead of to the labor 
 lodge, abundance of well-remunerated employment for the 
 devotion to duty on his part; comfort, contentment and happi 
 ness in his home. So may we, could all these things be achieved, 
 attain a measure of dignity and power of citizenship the like 
 of which the world has never yet seen. Then what a country 
 America would be! It is the misapprehension of these motives 
 of mine on the part of so many men good men not confined to 
 trades union circles by any means that makes me feel the 
 injustice and makes my task so much the harder. 
 
 But while God gives me life, I will go on with my work 
 and perform my self-imposed task as best I can. I will stand 
 by the flag, swear by it, and if need be die for it. 
 
 But all this is more or less "shop" talk, when I am really 
 not in the mood to talk shop, but am choke full of sentiment, 
 as you have sometimes suspected, and that sentiment has been 
 freshly aroused by your beautiful letter. 
 
 Believe me, dear Mr. Burdette, 
 
 Very truly and affectionately your friend, 
 
 HARRISON GRAY OTIS. 
 
 And after the dynamiting of the Times Building, 
 Mr. Burdette received this expression: 
 
 It does not become a manly man, a brave man, or a Chris 
 tian to boast that his life is at any time entirely outside of the 
 danger zone; nevertheless, I almost believe that, in my own 
 case, the dynamite bomb has not been manufactured which 
 is destined to end my life. More than one bomb may be 
 intended for that purpose, but destination is a word of different 
 meaning in this conjunction. So that I do not think it is 
 irreverent or impious in me to hold to the belief here indicated. 
 I shall, in any event, endeavor to adhere to my motto, "The 
 battle goes on." 
 
 Thanking you profoundly for your good will, your friend 
 ship and blessed prayers in my behalf, I remain, 
 Gratefully, your friend, 
 
 HARRISON GRAY OTIS. 
 438 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 The friend was justified who once wrote of him: 
 
 He lays the rough roads of purest nature even 
 And opens in each heart a little heaven. 
 
 As one re-reads his letters to friends, there is so much 
 of vivid personality in them, so much of friendliness and 
 caring, you feel as if the mail had just come in bearing 
 these messages. This is strikingly true of letters to the 
 immediate family. With infinite pains, he wrote them 
 long letters during the lecture season concerning his 
 engagements. And this was done in face of the fact 
 that his engagements were usually six a week in six 
 different towns or cities, with railroad travel between. 
 One letter to his sister Molly consisted of 
 
 Just a breathless minute between minutes to send a Mon 
 day morning kiss which isn t so frosty as it is sudden. 
 
 To his sister, whose son Fred was about to be mar 
 ried, he wrote from Vienna: 
 
 Old age is coming to me with multiplied blessings as our 
 boys and girls bring new nieces and nephews into the widening 
 circle. Well, love grows with its own life the more we have 
 to love, the more we love each other. And there is a big place 
 and a warm one in my heart already for Fred s wife. She is the 
 best girl on earth and I can prove it by Fred himself. 
 
 The tender solicitude toward his loved ones so 
 apparent in his early years, which indexed his character 
 and endeared him to his world of readers, was repeated 
 to my mother, when in advancing years she became 
 an invalid. He wrote her frequently entertaining let 
 ters that greatly cheered her on her way: 
 
 DEAR MUNNIE: We are happy as ever, and just as busy 
 as ever. Busier, I sometimes think. Clara has no time at all 
 at home; her desk is overflowing with business demands. I 
 am not quite so overwhelmed because a great deal of my corre- 
 
 439 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 spondence can wait until after I am dead, before being answered. 
 Last Sunday I preached in Temple Church twice. But Dr. 
 Eversole says that was the last time, and that I must not 
 preach but once a Sunday after that. And I obey him. I 
 find that I am more apt to be obedient to my guardians than 
 I used to be. Like all people who are growing old, I am 
 
 A little more tired at close of day; 
 A little less anxious to have my way; 
 A little less ready to scold and blame; 
 A little more care for another s name; 
 A broader view and a saner mind; 
 A little more love for all mankind ; 
 A little more charity in my views; 
 A little less thirst for the daily news; 
 A little more leisure to sit and dream; 
 A little more real the things unseen 
 And so I am faring a-down the way 
 That leads to the gates of the better day. 
 
 Monday night I went in to Los Angeles, a guest at a banquet 
 given to John, Cardinal Farley, by the Newman Club, the Roman 
 Catholic club of Los Angeles. I believe I was the only protes- 
 tant clergyman invited. Great banquet; lot of speeches; good 
 things to eat. 
 
 Tuesday was our day at home, as usual, and we remained 
 in Sunnycrest to receive our guests. Wednesday we went in 
 to Los Angeles early, for that is our regular weekly day in the 
 city. The last time before this that I was in a cyclone, was 
 on the night of the Fourth of July, 1876, in Burlington, Iowa, 
 when I had the entire roof of my house blown into the Missis 
 sippi river, a mile away, all my windows smashed and my stable 
 demolished. But this day in town, trying to keep up with 
 Clara, was something like it, only there wasn t so much property 
 destroyed. But we went to bed at 8 o clock that night and 
 got up at 8 o clock the next morning, still tired and sleepy. 
 Your daughter is a dear, good, sweet girl, but she is mighty 
 hard to follow over the hurdles. 
 
 Saturday I made a speech at the dinner of the Board of 
 Trade in Pasadena, and "made em holler". Violet had a 
 
 440 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 couple of committee meetings, and I think a meeting of the 
 hospital board. Friday I addressed the students of Occidental 
 College, and in the afternoon we went into the city. Saturday, 
 as you see by the enclosed programme, we went to the " Ground 
 Breaking for the Southwest Museum" and Clara made the 
 star speech of the occasion, and with Miss Fremont and General 
 Chaff ee, Bishop Conaty and other dignitaries, shoveled the 
 dirt that begins the excavation for the foundation of the build 
 ing. This morning Roy came out home and we went to the 
 Presbyterian church and then brought Roy home to dinner. 
 
 In the afternoon we went over to the Stoughtons, took 
 Mr. and Mrs. Stoughton in the car and all went into Los 
 Angeles, to the Columbia Hospital to see Helen and the baby 
 little " Clara Bradley Wheeler ". That is the little lady s name, 
 chosen by that blessed Helen. It is a name most appropriate 
 as well as pretty. That was Roy s mother s name; it was 
 Clara s name when I first met her, and it is pleasant to have it 
 reappear in the third generation. Baby and mother are getting 
 along splendidly. Little Clara is the sweetest, prettiest little 
 baby I ever saw. I have a great deal more share and credit 
 in her than I am entitled to. Helen says nobody calls it her 
 baby; the other day two persons came to the hospital and 
 asked permission to see "Doctor Burdette s granddaughter". 
 Everything comes to him who hath. 
 
 Roy is a great big husky fellow weighing 170 pounds, and 
 as handsome as he is big, as smart and capable as he is hand 
 some, and as good as he is all three put together. 
 
 So runs the world away. This week will be as busy as the 
 last. I don t wish we had any fewer friends, but it would be 
 pleasant if they made fewer demands upon us. All this cata 
 logue of our doings does not include Clara s committees and 
 boards, nor any of her social functions. But we all keep well 
 under all the pressure, and hope for easier days to come. 
 
 This he signed, "Your affectionate grandson", and 
 then he added the postscript: 
 
 See there, now! We re all crazy over being grandparents. 
 I can t think that anything but a grandson is worth while. And 
 how do you feel since you became a great-grandmother. 
 
 441 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 Among the latest letters to his relatives was one to 
 his sister Jo: 
 
 Things are moving about as usual out here. Clara is buoy 
 antly well, and busy, for she has her hands full of a sick old 
 husband, but she is the sweetest, tenderest, patientest nurse on 
 earth, and would make sickness a blessing if an arch-angel 
 could do that. I don t seem to be getting better very fast. 
 There has been some talk by the doctors of taking me apart 
 to see what makes me act that way. I have the sublimest 
 confidence in the ability of the Medicine Men to take me to 
 pieces. But I am a little doubtful of their skill in putting me 
 together again. They sit in consultation on me Saturday 
 morning, after which I will know more about myself than I 
 do now, or less. 
 
 Rob has changed papers, leaving the Deseret News and going 
 on another afternoon paper, the Telegram. I am a little sorry 
 for it, because the News is a rich paper, and has the reputation 
 of never discharging a faithful employe but keeping him on to 
 pension age something rather unusual in the newspaper 
 business. However, Robin is on the ground and understands 
 his own business better than I can at this distance. He is 
 getting too far along in years, however, to do much more 
 changing around. It keeps a man at the foot of the payroll 
 and the bottom of the promotion list all the time. 
 
 Roy, my son, always had the place of a real son in 
 his heart, and there was genuine comradery between 
 them. In Boston, he wrote him in 1911: 
 
 MY DEAR BOY: Yesterday I went out to the National Park 
 and saw New York wallop Boston in fine style up to the fateful 
 ninth inning, 5-3, when, on the second half, nobody on the 
 sacks, two balls and three strikes and nobody out, Ames, p. 
 for N. Y., suddenly lost control of his steering gear and the 
 Beaneaters clouted out 3 runs and the Giants stampeded for 
 the dressing room. It was a great game of good ball and the 
 only fly in my cake was not having my boy alongside to help 
 me take the highest vocal hurdles. Muwer, strangely and 
 coldly indifferent to this best Boston culture and refined art 
 442 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 would not go to the game, but I took her to "The Pops" at 
 night. 
 
 Say, I heard our old friend, William Henry Tell, by an 
 orchestra of 55 pieces. Did they tear it off? They made a 
 paper snow storm of it. "Hoffman s Love Tales" for an 
 encore. 
 
 I am feeling jolly well and good. Lots of love from both 
 of us. Carry our greeting to Helen of Pasadena should you 
 chance to see her to-morrow, whilk bein The Sawbbath day 
 ye will nae doot hae a crack i the kirk yard. 
 
 Affectionately, DADDY. 
 
 The friendship between them was very close and 
 tender and he seemed to have been the last person 
 "Daddy" recognized before his final sleep. A week 
 before he passed, when he revived from the state of 
 coma for a brief moment, he looked up into Roy s face 
 and whispered softly, "Oh, Roy, Oh, my Boy," with a 
 tenderness of meaning that life nor death can ever 
 obliterate from precious memory. 
 
 It is impossible for me to reveal to the reading 
 public the many expressions of affection, devotion and 
 reverence which his letters contained before and after 
 marriage, or to recite the various ingenious ways in 
 which he daily delighted himself and me by surprised 
 suggestions of his hourly thought of our life together. 
 In a letter just before our marriage, written from Wis 
 consin, where our early friendship began, he wrote* 
 
 Appleton, with its sweet old memories, dear, dear sweet 
 friend, for you and I were only friends then, true and warm 
 hearted friends, happy in the morning land, joyous in the 
 loves that reigned in our hearts; love so perfect in its happiness 
 that it gladly made place by its side for new friendships. How 
 little did we dream that the coming years would make that 
 love something as holy and sacred as religion and ripen that 
 friendship into love. Again we met, and again one summer 
 afternoon at Winona Lake your baby was in your arms; the 
 mother beauty on your face and the mother love in your 
 
 443 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 beautiful eyes. You have forgotten, because to your heart it 
 seemed a little thing, but I never have how gentle and sweet 
 you were to my motherless little boy who came to your tent 
 with me. How different is all the world of today from what 
 we then dreamed it would be. Good-night my dear sweet 
 friend of yesterday my sweetheart of today. God keep you 
 safe through all the night, and God bless with all tenderness 
 and all grace of purity and sweetness the love that knits 
 together our thoughts and lives. 
 
 Again, his poetical imaginative nature is revealed in 
 a letter from Eau Claire, where we first met in a pulpit 
 where he was to preach one Sunday night, and I was 
 asked to read the hymns. He used to tell of this 
 instance, saying he did not exactly see the need "of a 
 lady to read hymns before I should preach, but when 
 I heard the first lines read, I was thrilled with the most 
 musical voice I had ever heard, and the memory of it 
 never left me". So in 1898 he wrote from there: 
 
 A thousand sweet and tender memories sweep over my soul 
 as the train waits here this winter morning. I look down at 
 the many-spired little city, the bridges lacing the river with 
 their open frames, the browns of the dead oak leaves filling 
 in like shadows on the white snow the long sluices with great 
 icicles pendant from them the stretching acres of lumber piles 
 on the river bank. Oh, my sweet dear friend, in those old days 
 when friendship blossomed in an hour to ripen into the sun- 
 kissed fruitage of love, ardent, pure, tender, after many years, 
 as you read this your thoughts are my own thoughts. I wonder, 
 Violet dear, if my mind so often going back to our first meeting, 
 unconsciously ran farther back than that, for there is so wrought 
 into my thought of you this half-waking, half-dreaming im 
 pression that you I knew when you were a little girl. For you 
 know, I have always had that half feeling of a boy s acquaint 
 ance with you, but not of playmates, exactly; I have never 
 lost the sense of the difference between our ages, so in those 
 days I was a very big boy of 21 to the little 10 year old girl, 
 quite a young man indeed, I was. But I was very fond of you, 
 do you remember, and I loved your merry, light-hearted romp- 
 444 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 ing ways and your quiet loving ways, and your child caress. 
 Very tenderly all these things came into my thought as the 
 train waited at Eau Claire, a little while ago, and the City 
 passed slowly out of the range of my vision, as though I had 
 awakened from a sweet dream of Eau Claire and Clara B. 
 Wheeler. For the young professor came into the picture too. 
 Rightly did you say to me, "You can never be jealous of him, 
 Rob." Never, for the least shadowy fleeting moment. Alway 
 and often and lovingly as you will, you may talk of him, and 
 like one thought our hearts will pay tender homage to the 
 memory of a pure, noble life, that went out with the morning 
 tide. 
 
 It has begun to snow again and the white flakes sweep 
 through the trees and over the farms like a winter mist. Every 
 where in this enchanted Eau Claire land, the snow. The low 
 graceful slope of the hills lie before me like your dear life 
 pure, gentle, beautiful. The sweet white snow! How it beau 
 tifies everything it touches. City street and fallow field, 
 thatched cottage and towered mansion it gives the same touch 
 of beauty to all of them. So God s loving mercy covers the 
 yesterdays where raged and stormed and fought the fiery pas 
 sions, and vaunting temptations, and fierce appetites of men, 
 with all their pride and hopes, and ambitions. God be merciful 
 to them. God pity my Yesterdays and hold all my To-morrows 
 in loving and wise and mighty hands for me. My To-morrows! 
 Beautiful, and sweet, and good and pure they will be, for you 
 will be in them. God keep you safe! 
 
 During the long years of our correspondence many 
 were the single verses and poems written incisted in the 
 hearts of letters, but perhaps it would not be amiss to 
 give to the public one which came shortly before our 
 marriage: 
 
 CLARA 
 
 When I shall see My Lady face to face 
 
 Dear face as calm and gracious as the dawn; 
 When with glad eyes in sweet content I trace 
 
 The beauty that my love-lit dreams have drawn 
 My Lady s face! 
 
 445 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 When I can look into My Lady s eyes, 
 
 Starlit and tender with love-radiant gleams; 
 
 And see in them more deep than summer skies 
 The Look of Looks that blessed my waking dreams 
 My Lady s eyes! 
 
 When I will hold My Lady s hands in mine 
 Fair hands, that gently hold my captive heart 
 
 When round them both mine own shall closely twine 
 In such a clasp that time nor fate can part 
 My Lady s hands! 
 
 What can I do, when at her feet I kneel? 
 
 My eager lips, thrilled with impetuous speech, 
 Will dumbly falter, as the heart will feel 
 
 More than earth s loudest eloquence can teach! 
 My Lady Mine. 
 
 Your lover, 
 
 ROBERT. 
 Once he wrote: 
 
 We are two noon-day lovers. Maybe that is the reason 
 why there has been so much sunshine in it all dear. The 
 shadows are shortest at noon-tide you know, and softest and 
 tenderest and sweetest in the afternoon. God grant it shall 
 be so. 
 
 That it was granted so, he recorded in his Diary 
 when we were in Venice some years later. 
 
 This afternoon we rowed out on the Giudecca and watched 
 the sunset by moonlight a beautiful effect, and rowed home 
 through the picturesque Italian shipping in the darkening 
 twilight just we two gray-haired lover and brown-haired 
 sweetheart. 
 
 Many were the incidents of the years, the memory 
 of which bring back the smile. One day a letter came, 
 containing a check addressed to him, but intended for 
 me. I found it on my desk with this notation on the 
 446 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 envelope in red ink, "Opened by mistake by your 
 needy, impecunious but admiring husband", and inside 
 this parody: 
 
 And be these juggling business-fiends no more believed 
 
 That palter with us in a double sense; 
 That write the word of promise on the envelope s address, 
 
 And break it in the check. 
 
 MIKE BETH. 
 
 While attending a National Convention of Women s 
 Clubs with me, he hung a card on the outside of our 
 door: "Madam the President is out but the Office Cat 
 is in, come right in, " and afterward he said to a reporter: 
 
 Yes, Mrs. Burdette was with the California delegation and 
 I was errand boy. I kept the door-knob polished, took in the 
 regrets of those who could not come, received the guests and 
 performed various other duties. I had a good time and I 
 never had that at any of the men s conventions I ever attended. 
 
 From that Convention, I went with him to the 
 National Republican Convention at Philadelphia, " just 
 to show/ as he said, "what real team work is". So, 
 often we spoke from the same platform at his insistence, 
 especially before schools, because, he urged : 
 
 No finer illustration can be given the young people in this 
 age of domestic differences that it is possible for husband and 
 wife to be vitally interested in life and devotedly interested in 
 each other at the same time. 
 
 He took great joy in surprising me by some little 
 gift a verse written out and pinned on my pillow, a 
 little book laid at my plate and "in all the little ways 
 that love creates". When away from home he wrote 
 to my dressmaker: 
 
 I want to surprise Mrs. Burdette with such an Easter 
 present as no one but you can design for her. I want a white 
 
 447 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 gown she is lovelier than a dream in white in some soft look 
 ing stuff. I think it is "Nun s veilinr " or something of that 
 sort. I want it beautifully plain exquisitely simple some 
 thing she can wear about the house just for me and yet it 
 must do for a simple evening at home ^or friends who "just 
 drip in" nothing formal, you know. She has plenty of 
 elaborate ornate dinner and reception gowns. I know you 
 will understand what I want. And Madame My Lady must 
 know nothing about it until she opens the box. 
 
 And when it arrived he took a hurried moment in 
 which to write: 
 
 MY gown came in ample time and it is lovely as a violet. 
 And "She" looked lovelier in it than a June morning. And 
 wasn t My Lady delighted ! AND SURPRISED ! ! And didn t 
 I get a BIG ONE! ! ! What a joy it must be to you just to 
 create such a vision of loveliness. 
 
 He seemed never to read a book or a magazine 
 without having me in mind, making marginal notes and 
 interlining comments for me to see later. When reading 
 "John Percyfield", he underlined this sentence: "To 
 believe in excellence is to be an aristocrat, " and wrote in 
 pencil (You dear) : "To believe in it for all people is to 
 be a democrat," and followed it with the penciled 
 "me", showing he felt himself to possess the true spirit 
 of democracy, desiring the utmost measure of individual 
 good for all. 
 
 To one of his sons he wrote: 
 
 We are all just as busy as ever. The past week has been a 
 cyclone. I have spent most of it trying to follow Muvver over 
 the jumps and across the ploughed fields, and if I ain t knee 
 sprung with sprained pasterns and wind galls, I must be a 
 mountain goat. 
 
 But there came a time when it was not so difficult 
 for us to walk side by side, for he wrote to my son from 
 Honolulu: 
 
 448 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 Dear Little Mama doesn t rally from the lassitude so well 
 as I would like. She wearies easily tho she looks well as she 
 always does. This morning in the little pink house gown and 
 the daintiest pink bow at her baby-throat and the carnation 
 pinks in her cheeks, she was a Pasadena rose-bud to make her 
 husband fall in love with her over again, every time he looks 
 at her. 
 
 The recovery of speed is referred to later in a letter 
 from Japan to his sister Jo. 
 
 About four mornings in the week, I have a newspaper 
 letter of from 1200 to 1500 words to write, and the rest of the 
 time I am trying to keep up with my little wife. And I could 
 do it easy enough if I could trade my boots for a pair of wings. 
 
 When I had gone to the sea coast once for a Httle 
 rest, he sent me this solicitous note: 
 
 I hope you go to bed early and get up late and have break 
 fast in bed. Do get a little rest dear. This life of ours is killing 
 home life, social life, and reflective life, and giving us only 
 strain and stress the wear of nerves and the waste of brain 
 and heart. Let s cut out a lot of it. I am beginning to think 
 we have had about honors enough, when we sit down and count 
 the cost of them. 
 
 In June of 1914, we were separated two weeks and a 
 half at his earnest solicitation. I went for a little rest 
 to a convention, and his letters, which were to be his 
 last to me, were written with all the ardor and tender 
 ness and endearment of a youthful lover. The heart 
 of him never grew too old for intense loving, though 
 the physical weakened under illness and the years. 
 From one of these letters I quote: 
 
 The enthusiasm of this last letter of yours is contagious, 
 and Oh I am glad, glad, so glad you are " there ". So glad I 
 almost forced you to go; so glad I have that much portion in 
 your happiness and benefit. I just love to think of you in 
 the heart of the Federation, in the life of those splendid women 
 
 29 449 
 
 * 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 who made the Federation what it is, for it is goddess-born. 
 You will write a sketch of its birth sometime and embalm the 
 names of the immortals who were its sponsors. 
 
 I went out to Ardmore [my son s home] and had a cheery- 
 visit of an hour and a half. Roy got up early last Sunday 
 morning in order to take care of his little daughter all day. 
 ALL DAY. All Day, Yes. That s what I said ALL DAY. 
 Blossom said he worked like a little man. Your granddaughter, 
 greatly encouraged by this unexpected reinforcement to the 
 nursing force, exerted herself to her utmost. She hung out 
 the banner "We aim to please," and invented new games and 
 athletic plays every minute. When 11 o clock came at last 
 and the nurse led her away to "Numa" and beddie, Roy fell 
 fainting on the couch in the library and turned to Blossom 
 saying faintly "Good Lord! Does she keep that up all day 
 and every day?" 
 
 Wasn t that delicious? 
 
 She was in the same humor yesterday. She showed me 
 her latest accomplishment. She stood before me, and gravely 
 gathered up her little skirt, and BOWED! Then she said 
 "Butterfly" without any qualifying phrase. 
 
 And this, the last letter entrusted to the mails: 
 
 Sunday, June 20th, 1914. 
 
 This is the home day and you are just a little bit closer 
 to me than ever, for it is our day. I dream of you, think of 
 you, long for you, and thank the dear Heavenly Father for 
 every memory of you. So dear, so sweet, so helpful you had 
 been and you are to me. The day is tender with its thoughts 
 of you. The waking hours that sometimes come to make the 
 night long, no longer come with dread and with tossings, for 
 you come with them, making them gentle with caresses; with 
 memories of tenderness; with whispers of courage and hope 
 with words of love; with all that you have been and are. A 
 host of angels come with your face Love, Hope, Promise, Joy. 
 The sun is slowly sinking to the hills that look down at Sunny- 
 crest, and I have just been watching it from the windows of 
 your little room above the western porch, dreaming that you 
 are standing beside me. 
 450 
 
SOME INTIMATE PHASES 
 
 Good-night then, my precious wife. Bend down over me 
 for a little minute while your kiss and your caressing arms 
 whisper your Benediction on my lips and my heart. God 
 bless and keep you. 
 
 And this was the written benediction he left on my 
 life. The spoken benediction, when after a most 
 tender and appreciative blessing for our lives together, 
 he added: 
 
 And I thank God for the gift of you to me. When you are 
 left alone when you have rested when you have had a change 
 you will lay aside the ashes of mourning from your heart and 
 go on with your life of work making it better than it has 
 ever been lifting up the fallen, helping those who need you, 
 and inaugurating great movements as you have always done. 
 I shall watch you doing it and rejoice that we did some of the 
 probationary work together. And God will give you grace and 
 comfort you. 
 
 451 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 A LAST TRIBUTE 
 
 THREE score years and ten was the calendar 
 measure of his life, but unto the third and 
 fourth generations is bequeathed the vivid 
 spirit which always emanated from his hope 
 fulness, his cheer and his optimism. Struggle and 
 poverty, pathos and sorrow and grief there was in his 
 life, but he builded on these his faith, his trust, his 
 unswerving belief in a Heavenly Father s abounding 
 love which overflowed through him for all humanity. 
 His imagination and the spiritual promises hid in his 
 heart had pictured for him over and over again his 
 entrance upon the joys of heaven, which to him was 
 such an actuality that he often spoke of it as one might 
 talk familiarly of a journey and the arrival at its 
 destination. And yet, we do not know, and possibly 
 he did not know when the spirit winged its flight. 
 Lingering unconscious for days, the physical act of 
 breathing ceased as a watch ceases to tick. His spirit 
 was always such a joyous one that the grief over our 
 immeasurable loss was intermingled with a peculiar 
 sense of happiness for him that his spirit had been 
 freed, and all he had believed, had prayed for and 
 tenaciously held to was now his to enjoy. 
 
 Expressions of appreciation and sorrow were nation 
 wide. A composite might be made of them, and the 
 outstanding lines would read: "Simple," "Heartful," 
 "Human/ "Loving," "Kind," but each one carries 
 a delicate shading of the analysis of these same human 
 elements. So I quote a few at random: 
 
 452 
 
A LAST TRIBUTE 
 
 The life and daily walk of Dr. Burdette was a perfect 
 flower of his doctrine and philosophy. No one will ever know 
 how many thousands of bitter and discouraged souls drank in 
 new sweetness and hope therefrom. Not until the final account 
 ing can there be any just estimate placed upon his work. He 
 lived and worked and laughed, and the world grew better and 
 happier and will remain better and happier because of him. 
 
 He wrote much for publication that could not be cata 
 logued as humorous, but through it all there was a genial, 
 direct, human approach, mingling the grave, the shrewd, the 
 idealistic, with the laughter often close to tears, which gave 
 his writings a wide audience and a powerful appeal. 
 
 Having just turned three score years and ten when sum 
 moned to the realm of eternal joy, he was humorist extraor 
 dinary and cheer-giver plenipotentiary for two generations. 
 
 There was always something about him suggestive of the 
 fountain of eternal youth. 
 
 It was given to him to feel deeply and to plumb the depths 
 of human hearts. 
 
 His ability to find something good in everything, his 
 determination to always make the worst appear better, was a 
 strong asset. 
 
 Two things there be for which men are better. Laughter 
 and Tears. Between them runs the gamut of human emotions, 
 and upon this harp of a thousand strings Dr. Burdette played 
 with the hand of a master, and all the music spoke of better 
 things, kindlier deeds and larger hopes. 
 
 His mission was to lighten the burdens of others, to preach 
 the gospel of good cheer, and by his pen, on the platform an 
 in the pulpit, right nobly has he acquitted himself in the years 
 of his ministration. What cobwebs of the brain he has helped 
 to brush away! What mental loads he has rendered it easier 
 to bear! To how many of us he has given a fresh grip when the 
 bottom of everything appeared to be slipping fast! Yes, he 
 has mellowed a lot, and so many of us. He has shown us how 
 
 453 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 to live kindlier, how to think in broader terms, to write with 
 less of the cankerous desire to wound. To quote the closing 
 lines of his last book, " For love is sweeter than life, and stronger 
 than death and larger than hate." 
 
 Strickland Gillilan, one of the American Press Humorists, 
 of which Mr. Burdette was perpetual "Pastor Emeritus", 
 wrote, " He was like a tender father to every one of us. Speak 
 ing of Burdette to Riley last fall, I said, When Bob Burdette 
 says, God bless you! he means it, and Riley replied, So does 
 God when Bob says it. " 
 
 One of the last things from his pen was " Life s Melody and 
 Sweetness" from his loved home of "Sunnycrest", entitled 
 "Alpha and Omega", a poem in prose of the road of life from 
 the cradle to the grave, closing with this epigram: "And so, 
 as one in the gathering darkness retraces his steps by a half- 
 remembered path, much in the same way as he had come into 
 this world, he went out of it." 
 
 He held to the end the same good cheer and the same 
 smiling outlook on life, and the same kindliness that forebore 
 in the days of his unphilosophic youth to make a jest at the 
 cost of other men. He brought into the years more and more 
 the pathos of life, more of the rich intent of the Creator who 
 gave him the mystic gift of his divine humor, that earnestness 
 should mingle with our smiles and wisdom temper our mirth. 
 
 An appreciation of Mr. Burdette, written by John 
 S. McGroarty, author of "The Mission Play", is as 
 follows: 
 
 Some will say good-night to him, 
 
 And some will say farewell, 
 Hearts will ache and eyes be dim 
 
 With grief too deep to tell. 
 But some will say good-morrow 
 
 They who long before him trod 
 The valleys dark with sorrow, 
 
 To the happy hills of God. 
 
 454 
 
A LAST TRIBUTE 
 
 He wrought no tears until today, 
 
 No grief the heart to goad 
 He who was glad upon the way, 
 
 Who sang upon the road. 
 Content to stay, to go as sweet, 
 
 His story has been told ; 
 He fares at last, afar, to greet 
 
 The merry men of old. 
 
 Beyond the throb of earth s desires, 
 
 The foolish things and wise, 
 He seeks tonight the roadside fires 
 
 That gleam in Paradise. 
 And, be his pathway short or long, 
 
 And comes he soon or late, 
 The merry men of God will throng 
 
 To meet him at the gate. 
 
 Other words of appreciation were: 
 
 Robert J. Burdette has ceased to borrow time on this side 
 of the shoreless river, and on some sphere of nightless glory 
 has builded his altar for eternity. 
 
 He loved all things lovable in nature and humanity. He 
 loved good books; the masterpieces of art and architecture 
 and music were his companions. Soldier, patriot, author, 
 orator, wit, friend, dear old Bob, farewell. No, not farewell, 
 but good-night. We will see you in the morning. 
 
 God rest his gentle soul, and lend 
 His spirit with us to the end. 
 
 An oft-quoted response to a letter of sympathy 
 might be my added expression to these excerpts from 
 others: 
 
 Through all the years of my husband s life he has been 
 building a wonderful memory to himself by enfolding the world 
 in love and now these return such an outpouring of love and 
 tribute as rarely comes to one man. His going home was 
 
 455 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 gentle, joyous, beautiful, as had been his life and I walk 
 alone with my beautiful memories. 
 
 As he once wrote: 
 
 Yesterday s joys are pleasant, to me and to you. Yester 
 day s sorrows are sacred. The years make them divine. 
 
 So calmly did he think of the days that would follow 
 his passing, that while he was yet quite strong, he made 
 a memorandum which he told me I would find in his 
 desk, in suggesting arrangements for the services that 
 would follow his passing. In this he said: 
 
 One of my favorite hymns, one which Violet and I have 
 often sung together, is Oliver Wendell Holmes "Lord of All 
 Being Throned Afar". Always we sang it to Louvain. If 
 they should sing this over my casket, I think I could hear her 
 dear voice, dearest, tenderest, sweetest music in this world. 
 One other hymn, which is written on my heart, a hymn of the 
 Blessed Bernard of Clairvaux, "Jesus, the very Thought of 
 Thee". This we so often sang together to Claxton. These 
 are not "funeral" hymns, but my life was not timed to funeral 
 marches. Why should my death be sadder than my life? 
 
 This request was carried out at the services held in 
 the Pasadena Presbyterian church, of which he had once 
 been pastor. While the flags of the cities of Pasadena 
 and Los Angeles were at half mast, these hymns were 
 sung by a quartet of loyal friends, whose voices he had 
 loved in the years of his pastorate. 
 
 It seemed fitting indeed that his own funeral service should 
 have had in every word spoken, in each line of the Scripture 
 read, in every tender pulsing song, the message of faith, the 
 conviction of eternal life and its gladness. There was also an 
 appreciation expressed that the doors of the Auditorium in this 
 case were opened to every one, embodying the generous ideal 
 of the democracy and the catholicity that Dr. Burdette ever 
 expressed in his countless friendships and broad activities. 
 456 
 
A LAST TRIBUTE 
 
 Dr. Robert Freeman, Dr. Robert R. Meredith and 
 Dr. James Whitcomb Brougher, voiced the tributes of 
 the English speaking world, as well as neighbors and 
 immediate friends. Dr. Freeman dwelt upon what to 
 him epitomized Mr. Burdette s life, when he said: 
 
 He was kind. Other men shall tell the stories of the war, 
 for they too followed the drums of the Forty-seventh, they too 
 heard the sharp commands and followed the lead of Sherman 
 and Tuttle and Mower, they too faced the testing at the brook, 
 suffered from want and wounds and weary hearts and longed 
 for home and mother s love; but every one who tells of those 
 brave days and sad days shall link the name of their little 
 fellow soldier with some cheering words and some tender deed 
 that showed him to be kind. Others shall try to tell of his 
 lectures in the old days and to make us hear anew the jingle 
 of the jester s bells, and laugh anew with the wandering pur 
 veyor of sunshine; but I shall see in every line he wrote more 
 than his sensitive appreciation of the beautiful, more than his 
 versatile knowledge of men and of things, more than an unusual 
 fusion of talents, more than cleverness, more than happiness, 
 a soul overflowing with kindness. 
 
 0, we shall remember the good times we had with him in 
 great groups and in small. His commonest words were songs 
 in many keys, sweeter than instruments of ours e er caught. 
 We shall remember his sermons when with simple art he stirred 
 our souls to press towards the mark for the prize of the high 
 calling of God, when this man whom all the world did love 
 revealed to us the passion of his life to follow Christ and serve 
 Christ and tell the story of his Christ until it won upon the 
 hearts of men. But most of all we shall remember that kind 
 ness watered the roots of his life, and was the stream that made 
 possible the delight of men in the green pastures and blooming 
 flowers and refreshing fruit of his ministry. His jokes were 
 never gibes, his humor was ever pointed with generous intent, 
 and all the children of his mind were rocked in the cradle of 
 his loving heart. 
 
 Oh, for the subtle touch of his art! 
 0, for the gift of his pen! 
 
 457 
 
ROBERT J. BTJRDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 0, for his smile just once in a while! 
 
 0, for his ways among men ! 
 0, for the gentle charm of his speech! 
 
 0, for the powers of his mind ! 
 But mostly I pray, on this deep-shadowed day, 
 
 0, for his grace to be Kind ! 
 
 Tender and beautiful were the expressions given by 
 Dr. Robert R. Meredith, himself one of the grand old 
 men of the American pulpit, and one whose power had 
 not declined with the ripening wisdom of his advanced 
 years. As he stood in the pulpit where Mr. Burdette 
 himself had stood, the sunlight came streaming through 
 the cathedral windows, illuminating his distinguished 
 features, and his hair that was white like snow. Begin 
 ning in a clear yet low voice, as one who draws his 
 audience into confidence, then step by step, his beauti 
 ful eulogy was pronounced, his rich and vibrant voice 
 registering in deeper tones, ringing with sweet clarity: 
 
 He in whose honor we are gathered this afternoon is absent. 
 The beloved father and husband, the faithful and generous 
 friend, the wise and brave citizen, Robert J. Burdette, has 
 passed beyond our reach. He was given a quiet hour in which 
 to die at his beautiful home, Sunnycrest, and with those whom 
 he loved best on earth surrounding him. I am impressed with 
 the humanness of Dr. Burdette s life. He lived just a plain 
 everyday human life, with its ups and downs and its joys and 
 sorrows. The great secret of his power was his brotherly love 
 and his belief in God. His religious faith was not mere inherit 
 ance. It was his own and it fitted him exactly. 
 
 In his simple appraisement he gave expression to 
 the current thought of all the world that knew Mr. 
 Burdette. He said just what the world was waiting 
 to hear said. He caught the heart-throbs of a number 
 of sorrowing people and put them into speech. 
 458 
 
JULY 30. 1.84-4 ~ 
 
 " T Ht PiLCBlM.THEY LAID IN A 
 UPPER -,H3f ft WHOSE WINDOW 
 
 SING. THE NAME OF THE 
 -.WBEF^ HE SLEPT TILL 
 BREAK OF DAY: AD THEN HE AWGItE AWO SMC 
 
 THE FINAL WORD 
 
A LAST TRIBUTE 
 
 The offerings of flowers and the service were simple, 
 as Mr. Burdette would have wished, and at his oft- 
 spoken desire, I outwardly expressed the fact that I 
 was set aside to walk alone by the wearing of white 
 mourning. In this his expression was that it was life, 
 not death, which he would ever keep before the world. 
 
 We carried him to Rosedale, where reverently 
 about the open grave there stood a great gathering of 
 those who had known and loved him. Among them 
 were Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Gentiles, all 
 recognized representatives, who came to testify to the 
 Catholicism of Mr. Burdette s brotherhood and faith in 
 life and the eternal verities. He must have visioned 
 this when he wrote: 
 
 Such a sweet, beautiful place for one to sleep! child of 
 God, the graves of all who fall asleep are made in gardens of 
 loveliness. Birds of eternal hope and blossoms of faith fringe 
 every sleeping-place, and the gentle earth lies lightly on the 
 ashes that we love. Every cemetery in Christendom is a 
 garden. Today, in climes more rigorous than ours, men smile 
 with tender joy to see that the grass is green in the sun-gleams 
 that caress the little mounds where loved ones lie asleep, and 
 the children find the delicate anemones like stars shining down 
 in the graveyard grasses. In every home there is a pictured 
 face on the wall that brings the longing ache into the heart. 
 But the dear absent one sleeps in a garden, and everything in 
 the garden, grasses and buds and dainty wild flowers, stately 
 lily and queenly rose, majestic palm and oak and pine every 
 thing in the garden sings, and sings, and sings of life life 
 life and ever more life! Not of decay and death. 
 
 We laid him in Rosedale, in fulfillment of his written 
 request: 
 
 I desire to rest close beside her whose love and patience 
 and fidelity has pillowed my aching heart so many times when 
 the way of the pilgrimage was tear-swept, my Violet-wife. 
 
 459 
 
ROBERT J. BURDETTE HIS MESSAGE 
 
 It will be enough if the stone which shall mark the place 
 where nothing lies should bear no mark but my name, but if 
 anything be written thereon, this I selected for myself when I 
 was a boy of 14, indeed it was on my 14th birthday that I 
 formally chose it from the favorite book of my life time, the 
 "Pilgrim s Progress" "It is written of the night, Christian 
 slept in the house beautiful." 
 
 And there the stone has been placed which bears his 
 name and the inscription: 
 
 "The Pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber, 
 whose window opened towards the sunrising; the name 
 of the chamber was Peace, where he slept till break of 
 day, and then he awoke and sang." 
 
 460 
 
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