uiet for once.) Have you not sometimes seen one or
more go to sleep in company while you have been talking? Did not that
show they were unable to resist the soothing influence of your
long-continued and thoughtless words? And have you not sometimes talked
upon subjects in such a peculiar and protracted manner that when you
have done, your hearers have been so absent-minded that they have not
known anything you have said? Has not this taught you that you have been
a drag upon their mental powers? Have they not said in the words of Job,
"O that you would altogether hold your peace, and it should be your
wisdom"? (Job xiii. 5.)

Conversation is a means of mutual interchange of thought and feeling
upon subjects which may be introduced. And if the right subject be
brought forward, each one could contribute his quota to the general
stock. But to do so we must talk _with_ people and not _at_ them. We
must be willing to hear as well as to be heard. We must give others
credit to know something as well as ourselves. We must remember it is
not he who talks most that talks best. One man may give a long, wordy,
dry essay on a topic of conversation, and another may speak a sentence
of a score words which shall contain far more sense than his long
discourse.

"Words learned by rote a parrot may rehearse,
But talking is not always to converse.
Not more distinct from harmony divine,
The constant creaking of a country sign."

* * * * *

"If in talking from morning till night,
A sign of our wisdom it be,
The swallows are wiser by right,
For they prattle much faster than we."

"The talking lion of the evening circle," observes an English writer,
"generally plays off his part as obviously to his own satisfaction as to
the nausea of the company who forbear to hear him. Were he a
distinguished and illustrious talker like Johnson and Coleridge, he
might be excused, though in their case they laid too much embargo upon
the interchange of thought; but when the mind is an ordinary one, the
offence is insufferable, if not unpardonable. Those that talk much
cannot often talk well. There is generally the least of originality and
interest about what they say. It is the dry, old, oft-repeated things
which are nearly as well stereotyped upon the minds of the hearers as
they are upon their own. And even those who have the gift of talking
sensibly as well as loquaciously should remember th