n to the
people. He agreed with me altogether, provided it were _possible_ for
him to do it, which he denied, though he promised to take the subject
into serious consideration once more, to oblige me.

From Boston I went to Portland, where I had a similar talk with that
most amiable and excellent man, the late Dr. Nichols, who labored under
a similar disqualification, owing to a similar misapprehension of what
was required for extemporaneous speaking, either on the platform or in
the pulpit. I told him the story, and urged the same considerations; but
he, like Mr. Pierpont, only smiled,--compassionately, as I thought, and
rather as if he pitied the delusion I was laboring under. Yet within two
years both of these remarkable men became free and natural spontaneous
speakers, and both acknowledged to me that they had always misunderstood
the difficulty. Dr. Nichols began afar off, as I suggested, in the
Sabbath school; and Mr. Pierpont, after making two or three attempts in
a small way, which were anything but satisfactory to himself,--as I told
him they would be for a while, if he had the true stuff in him,--was at
last surprised into doing what he believed to be impossible, by the
merest accident in the world; after which he had no further trouble. It
seems that he had engaged to supply a neighboring pulpit,--perhaps that
of his son John, who was newly settled at Lynn. He thought he had his
sermon in his pocket; but, on entering the pulpit, found that he had
either left it at home or lost it on the way. What was to be done?
Luckily, he had just read it over the night before, and was full of the
subject therein treated. Remembering what I said, as he told me himself,
he determined to go to work, hit or miss, and either make a spoon or
spoil a horn.

The result was, that, after a little hesitation and floundering, he got
fairly in earnest, and threw off a discourse which so delighted those
who were best acquainted with him, that they stopped round the door to
shake hands and congratulate him. He had never preached so well in all
his life, they said. This settled the question forever; and from that
day forward he began to believe that anybody who can talk in his chair
can talk standing up, after he has got over his first impressions, and
all the better for having a large auditory, with upturned faces, before
him; so that he became at last, and within a few years, one of the
finest pulpit orators of the day, and one of the