not being what the old New England housekeeper used to
call "forehanded." The real solution of the problem of what to do with
an empty head is never to let it become empty. In the artesian wells of
Dakota the water rushes to the surface and leaps a score of feet above
the ground. The secret of this exuberant flow is of course the great
supply below, crowding to get out.

What is the use of stopping to prime a mental pump when you can fill
your life with the resources for an artesian well? It is not enough to
have merely enough; you must have more than enough. Then the pressure of
your mass of thought and feeling will maintain your flow of speech and
give you the confidence and poise that denote reserve power. To be away
from home with only the exact return fare leaves a great deal to
circumstances!

Reserve power is magnetic. It does not consist in giving the idea that
you are holding something in reserve, but rather in the suggestion that
the audience is getting the cream of your observation, reading,
experience, feeling, thought. To have reserve power, therefore, you must
have enough milk of material on hand to supply sufficient cream.

But how shall we get the milk? There are two ways: the one is
first-hand--from the cow; the other is second-hand--from the milkman.

_The Seeing Eye_

Some sage has said: "For a thousand men who can speak, there is only one
who can think; for a thousand men who can think, there is only one who
can see." To see and to think is to get your milk from your own cow.

When the one man in a million who can see comes along, we call him
Master. Old Mr. Holbrook, of "Cranford," asked his guest what color
ash-buds were in March; she confessed she did not know, to which the old
gentleman answered: "I knew you didn't. No more did I--an old fool that
I am!--till this young man comes and tells me. 'Black as ash-buds in
March.' And I've lived all my life in the country. More shame for me not
to know. Black; they are jet-black, madam."

"This young man" referred to by Mr. Holbrook was Tennyson.

Henry Ward Beecher said: "I do not believe that I have ever met a man
on the street that I did not get from him some element for a sermon. I
never see anything in nature which does not work towards that for which
I give the strength of my life. The material for my sermons is all the
time following me and swarming up around me."

Instead of saying only one man in a million can see, it would strike
n