or, while a warm audience will make a poor lecture good.

Let me illustrate:

When I was a boy we had a barrel of sorghum in the woodshed. When
mother wanted to make ginger-bread or cookies, she would send me to the
woodshed to get a bucket of sorghum from that barrel.

Some warm September day I would pull the plug from the barrel and the
sorghum would fairly squirt into my bucket. Later in the fall when it
was colder, I would pull the plug but the sorghum would not squirt. It
would come out slowly and reluctantly, so that I would have to wait a
long while to get a little sorghum. And on some real cold winter day I
would pull the plug, but the sorghum would not run at all. It would
just look out at me.

I discovered it was the temperature.

I have brought a barrel of sorghum to this audience. The name of the
sorghum is "The University of Hard Knocks." I can only pull the plug. I
cannot make it run. That will depend upon the temperature of this
audience. You can have all you want of it, but to get it to running
freely, you will have to warm up.

Did You Bring a Bucket?

No matter how the sorghum runs, you have to have a bucket to get it.
How much any one gets out of a lecture depends also upon the size of
the bucket he brings to get it in. A big bucket can get filled at a
very small stream. A little bucket gets little at the greatest stream.
With no bucket you can get nothing at Niagara.

That often explains why one person says a lecture is great, while the
next person says he got nothing out of it.

What It's All About

Here is a great mass of words and sentences and pictures to express two
or three simple little ideas of life, that our education is our growing
up from the Finite to the Infinite, and that it is done by our own
personal overcoming, and that we never finish it.

Have you noticed that no sentence, nor a million sentences, can bound
life? Have you noticed that every statement does not quite cover it? No
statement, no library, can tell all about life. No success rule can
alone solve the problem. You must average it all and struggle up to a
higher vision.

We are told that the stomach needs bulk as well as nutriment. It would
not prosper with the necessary elements in their condensed form. So
abstract truths in their lowest terms do not always promote mental
digestion like more bulk in the way of pictures and discussions of
these truths. Here is bulk as well as nutriment.

If