le and the tuning--How we know things--Trimmed at the
shell game--My "fool drawer"--Getting "selected to receive 1,000 per
cent"--You must earn what you own--Commencement orations--My maiden
sermon--The books that live have been lived--Singer must live
songs--Successful songs written from experience--Theory and
practice--Tuning the strings of life

VIII. LOOKING BACKWARD--Memories of the price we pay--My first school
teaching--Loaning the deacon my money--Calling the roll of my
schoolmates--At the grave of the boy I had envied--Why Ben Hur won the
chariot race--Pulling on the oar

IX. GO ON SOUTH!--The book in the running brook--The Mississippi keeps
on going south and growing greater--We generally start well, but
stop--Few go on south--The plague of incompetents--Today our best day,
tomorrow to be better--Birthdays are promotions--I am just
beginning--Bernhardt, Davis, Edison--Moses begins at eighty--Too busy
to bury--Sympathy for the "sob squad"--Child sees worst days, not
best--Waiting for the second table--Better days on south--Overcoming
obstacles develops power--Go on south from principle, not praise--Doing
duty for the joy of it--Becoming the "Father of Waters"--Go on south
forever!

X. GOING UP LIFE'S MOUNTAIN--The defeats that are victories--Climbing
Mount Lowe--Getting above the clouds into the sunshine--Each day we
rise to larger vision--Getting above the night into the eternal
day--Going south is going upward

Some Preliminary Remarks

LADIES and Gentlemen:

I do not want to be seen in this lecture. I want to be heard. I am only
the delivery wagon. When the delivery wagon comes to your house, you
are not much interested in how it looks; you are interested in the
goods it brings you. You know some very good goods are sometimes
delivered to you in some very poor delivery wagons.

So in this lecture, please do not pay any attention to the delivery
wagon--how much it squeaks and wheezes and rattles and wabbles. Do not
pay much attention to the wrappings and strings. Get inside to the
goods.

Really, I believe the goods are good. I believe I am to recite to you
some of the multiplication table of life--not mine, not yours alone,
but everybody's.

Can Only Pull the Plug!

Every audience has a different temperature, and that makes a lecture go
differently before every audience. The kind of an audience is just as
important as the kind of a lecture. A cold audience will make a good
lecture po