tmosphere is
invigorated by salt sea breezes; a choir of five hundred sing the
audience into a receptive mood and the speaker is borne from climax to
climax on wings of applause."

I would not have you infer from this that a large audience is always
necessary to success. Indeed the most successful and satisfactory
address I ever made was to an audience of one. If I can make as
favorable an impression upon you as I did upon that young lady I shall
be gratified.

In Pauling, New York, Chauncey M. Depew by his attention and applause
inspired me more than the whole audience beside; while time and again
have I been helped to do my best by the presence of that matchless
queen of the platform, Frances E. Willard.

The very opposite of greatness has had the same effect upon me. At the
Pontiac, Illinois, Chautauqua after lecturing to a great audience, I
was invited by the superintendent of the State Reformatory to address
the inmates of the prison. At the close of a thirty minutes' talk the
superintendent said: "Your address to my boys exceeded the one you
gave at the Chautauqua."

Why was it better? At the Chautauqua I was trying to entertain and
instruct an intelligent audience. Within the grey walls of that prison
I was reaching down to the very depths, endeavoring to lift up human
beings, marred and scarred by sin and crime, but dear to the mothers
who bore them and the Savior who died for them.

If I were a preacher in New York City and were announced to preach a
sermon on home missionary work I would not go to the church by way of
the mansions of the rich where children, shod in satin slippers dance
and play over velvet tapestry, but by way of the slums where I would
meet the children of misery, where,

"To stand at night 'mid the city's throng,
And scan the faces that pass along,
Is to read a book whose every leaf
Is a history of woe and want and grief.
As in tears of sorrow and sin and shame,
You read a story of blight and blame,
Your heart goes further than hand can reach
And you feel a sermon you cannot preach."

Whoever would prove worthy of the platform must have a message and
give to it the devotion of mind, heart and conscience, no matter
whether his purpose is to convince by reasoning, convert by appeal,
delight by rhetoric, or cure melancholy by humor. Each has its useful
influence on the platform.

Some persons have an impression that the student deals in logic, while
the orator sim