n more
than does Conwell himself. Nothing is more surprising, nothing is more
interesting, than the way in which he makes use as illustrations of the
impressions and incidents of his long and varied life, and, whatever it
is, it has direct and instant bearing on the progress of his discourse.
He will refer to something that he heard a child say in a train
yesterday; in a few minutes he will speak of something that he saw or
some one whom he met last month, or last year, or ten years ago--in
Ohio, in California, in London, in Paris, in New York, in Bombay; and
each memory, each illustration, is a hammer with which he drives home a
truth.

The vast number of places he has visited and people he has met, the
infinite variety of things his observant eyes have seen, give him his
ceaseless flow of illustrations, and his memory and his skill make
admirable use of them. It is seldom that he uses an illustration from
what he has read; everything is, characteristically, his own. Henry
M. Stanley, who knew him well, referred to him as "that double-sighted
Yankee," who could "see at a glance all there is and all there ever
was."

And never was there a man who so supplements with personal reminiscence
the place or the person that has figured in the illustration. When
he illustrates with the story of the discovery of California gold at
Sutter's he almost parenthetically remarks, "I delivered this lecture on
that very spot a few years ago; that is, in the town that arose on that
very spot." And when he illustrates by the story of the invention of the
sewing-machine, he adds: "I suppose that if any of you were asked who
was the inventor of the sewing-machine, you would say that it was Elias
Howe. But that would be a mistake. I was with Elias Howe in the Civil
War, and he often used to tell me how he had tried for fourteen years to
invent the sewing-machine and that then his wife, feeling that something
really had to be done, invented it in a couple of hours." Listening to
him, you begin to feel in touch with everybody and everything, and in a
friendly and intimate way.

Always, whether in the pulpit or on the platform, as in private
conversation, there is an absolute simplicity about the man and his
words; a simplicity, an earnestness, a complete honesty. And when he
sets down, in his book on oratory, "A man has no right to use words
carelessly," he stands for that respect for word-craftsmanship that
every successful speaker or writ