Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1890 — Tom Corwin’s Audience. [ARTICLE]

Tom Corwin’s Audience.

' A"recently tohTstory about Judge John A. Corwin of Ohio calls to the mind of a valued friend an incident in the career of the judge's famous brother, says the Washington Post. Tom had written a lecture, in which he had given full play to his robust humor, and in order to try it on a dog, as it were, went to a little sober-sided town in Ashtabula county. The people pl the town were very seriously affected by the prospect that so great and so famous a man was coming among thenv and the ball was well tilled. As the lecturer entered a hush fell upon the audience. _ The poor country people weredeeply and solemnly impressed by the presence of such a man. In his “very best spirits Tom began his lecture. It was his intention to set his audience into a roar of laughter at the very beginning, but his effort was in vain. The people sat there in open-mouthed wonder, swallowing his tremendous fiction as a great and beneficial truth. For an hour and a half he labored to produce a smile. He twinkled, scintillated, effervesced, but all to no purpose. The audience was as solemn as a sexton. When he had concluded his lecture and was leaving the hall quite Iconvinded that he should never succeed with that lecture, he was met hy an old man who gravely said: “Gov’ner, I’m much obleeged fer that lectur, and 1 want to make a leetle apology fer me an’ some o' my neighbors, fer I guess you noticed some on us looked like we sorter wanted to laugh. ’Twan’t no feelin’ uv disrespect fer you, gov’ner, but they was two or three times there that we couldn’t havdVj iveXp snickerin' right out.”