y of America.
Its nature invites the orator to a great range of talk; he may browse at
large in all the fields of verbiage without seeming to break bounds. It
rests with him, of course, to decide whether he will talk too long, for
the danger that he may do so cannot be guarded from the outside. The
only good after-dinner speaker is the man who likes to speak, and the
man who likes to speak is always apt to speak too much. The hapless
wretch whom the chairman drags to his feet in a cold perspiration of
despair, and who blunders through half a dozen mismated sentences,
leaving out whatever he meant to say, is not to be feared; he is to be
pitied from the bottom of one's soul. But the man whose words come
actively to the support of his thoughts, and whose last word suggests to
him another thought, he is the speaker to be feared, and yet not feared
the worst of all. There is another speaker more dreadful still, who
thinks as little standing as sitting, and whose words come reluctantly,
but who keeps on and on in the vain hope of being able to say something
before he stops, and so cannot stop.

The speaking at the occasional dinner, however, is much more in the
control of the chairman than the speaking at the personal dinner. The
old fashion of toasts is pretty well past, but the chairman still
appoints, more or less, the subject of the speaker he calls up. He may
say, if the dinner is in honor of the Invention of Gunpowder, "We have
with us to-night a distinguished soldier who has burned a good deal of
gunpowder in his time; and I am sure we should all like to hear from
General Jones something of his experience with the new smokeless
explosives." Or if it is the Discovery of America they are
commemorating, he may call to his feet some representatively venerable
citizen, with a well-earned compliment to his antiquity, and the
humorous suggestion that he was personally knowing to the landing of
Columbus. Then General Jones, or the venerable citizen, will treat at
his pleasure of any subject under heaven, after having made his manners
to that given him by the chairman and professed his unfitness to handle
it.

At the personal dinner, the speaker must in decency stick for a while at
least to his text, which is always the high achievement of the honored
guest, in law, letters, medicine, arms, drainage, dry-goods,
poultry-farming, or whatever. He must not, at once, turn his back on the
honored guest and talk of other things; an