NOAH Webster probably had the best command of language of any author of our time. Those who have read his great work entitled Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, or How One Word Led to Another, will agree with me that he was smart. Noah never lacked for a word by which to express himself. He was a brainy man and a good speller.

We were speaking of Mr. Webster on the way up here this afternoon, and a gentleman from Ashland told me of his death. Those of you who have read Mr. Webster's works will be pained to learn of this. One by one our eminent men are passing away. Mr. Webster has passed away; Napoleon Bonaparte is no more, and Dr. Mary Walker is fading away. This has been a severe winter on Sitting Bull, and I have to guard against the night air a good deal myself.

It would ill become me at this late date to criticise Mr. Webster's work, a work that is now I may say in nearly every office, home, school-room and counting-room in the land. It is a great book. I only hope that had Mr. Webster lived he would have been equally fair in his criticism of my books.

I hate to compare my books with Mr. Webster's, because it looks egotistical in me; but although Noah's book is larger than mine and has more literary attractions as a book to set a child on at the table, it does not hold the interest of the reader all the way through.

He has tried to introduce too many characters into his book at the expense of the plot. It is a good book to pick up and while away a leisure hour, perhaps, but it is not a work that could rivet your interest till midnight, while the fire went out and the thermometer went down to 47 below zero. You do not hurry through the pages to see whether Reginald married the girl or not. Mr. Webster didn't seem to care whether he married the girl or not.

Therein consists the great difference between Noah and myself. He don't keep up the interest. A friend of mine at Sing Sing who secured one of my books, said he never left his room till he had devoured it. He said he seemed chained to the spot, and if you can't believe a convict who is entirely ont of politics, who in the name of George Washington can you believe?

Mr. Webster was certainly a most brilliant writer, but a little inclined, perhaps, to be wrong. I have discovered in some of his later books 118,000 words no two of which are alike. This shows great fluency and versatility, it is true, but we need something else. The reader waits in vain to be thrilled by the author's wonderful word-painting. There is not a thrill in the whole tome. Noah wasn't much of a thriller. I am free to confess that when I read this book, of which I had heard so much, I was bitterly disappointed. It is a larger book than mine and costs more, and has more pictures in it than mine, but is it a work that will make a man lead a different life? What does he say of the tariff? What does he say of the roller skating rink? He is silent. He is full of cold, hard words and dry definitions, but what does he say of the Mormons and female suffrage, and how to cure the pip? Nothing. He evades everything, just as a man does when he writes a letter accepting the nomination for President.

As I said before, however, it is a good book to pickup for a few moments or to read on the train. I could never think of taking a long r. r. journey without Mr. Webster's tale in my pocket. I would just as quick think of traveling without my bottle of cough medicine as to start out without Mr. Webster's book.

Mr. Webster's Speller was a work of less pretensions, perhaps, but it had an immense sale. Eight years ago 40,000,000 of these books had been sold, and yet it had the same grave defect. It was disconnected, cold, prosy and dull. I read it for years, and at last became a very close student of Mr. Webster's style. Still I never found but one thing in the book for which there was such a stampede, which was even ordinarily interesting, and that was a perfect gem. It was so thrilling in detail and so different from Mr. Webster's general style that I have often wondered who he got to write it for him. Perhaps it was the author of the Bread Winners. It related to the discovery of a boy in the crotch of an old apple tree by an elderly gentleman, and the feeling of bitterness and animosity that sprang up between the two, and how the old man told the boy at first that he had better come down out of that tree, because he was afraid the limb would break with him and let him fall. Then, as the boy still remained, he told him that those were not eating-apples, that they were just common cooking-apples, and that there were worms in them. But the boy said he didn't mind a little thing like that. So then the old gentleman got irritated and called the dog and threw turf at the boy, and at last saluted him with pieces of turf and decayed cabbages; and after he had gone away the old man pried the bulldog's jaws open and found a mouthful of pantaloons and a freckle. I do not tell this, of course, in Mr. Webster's language but I give the main points as they recur now to my mind.

Though I have been a close student of Mr. Webster for years and examined his style closely, I am free to say that his ideas about writing a book are not the same as mine. Of course it is a great temptation for a young author to write a book that will have a large sale, but that should not be all. We should have a higher object than that, and strive to interest those who read our books. It should not be jerky and scattering in its statements.

I do not wish to do an injustice to a great man who I learn is now no more, a man who has done so much for the world and who could spell the longest word without hesitation, but I speak of these things just as I would expect others to criticise nay work. If one aspire to monkey with the literati of our day we must expect to be criticised. I have been criticised myself. When I was in public life—as a justice of the peace in the Rocky Mountains—a man came in one day and criticised me so that I did not get over it for two weeks.

I might add, though I dislike to speak of it now, that Mr. Webster was at one time a member of the Legislature of Massachusetts. I believe that was the only time he ever stepped aside from the straight and narrow way. A good many people do not know this, but it is true. It only shows how a good man may at one time in his life go wrong.