sly if you will, but sing! A man may
skate with all the skill in the world; he may glide forward with
incredible deftness and curve backward with divine grace, and yet if he
be not master of his emotions as well as of his feet, I would say--and
here Fate steps in--that he has failed."

* * * * *

There is, of course, plenty of good advice in the Stevenson book. But it
is much better as pure reading matter than as advice to the young idea
or even the middle-aged idea. It may have been all right for Stevenson
to "play the sedulous ape" and consciously imitate the style of Hazlitt,
Lamb, Montaigne and the rest, but if the rest of us were to try it there
would result a terrible plague of insufferably artificial and affected
authors, all playing the sedulous ape and all looking the part.

On the whole, the Stevenson book makes good reading and Miss Klickmann
gives good advice.

LVIII

"THE EFFECTIVE SPEAKING VOICE"

Joseph A. Mosher begins his book on "The Effective Speaking Voice" by
saying:

"Among the many developments of the great war was a widespread activity
in public speaking."

Mr. Mosher, to adopt a technical term of elocution, has said a mouthful.
Whatever else the war did for us, it raised overnight an army of public
speakers among the civilian population, many of whom seem not yet to
have received their discharge. It is the aim of Mr. Mosher's book to
keep this Landwehr in fighting trim and aid in recruiting its ranks,
possibly against the next war. Until every nation on earth has subjected
its public speakers to a devastating operation on the larynx no true
disarmament can be said to have taken place.

* * * * *

In the first place there are exercises which must be performed by the
man who would have an effective speaking voice, exercises similar to
Walter Camp's Daily Dozen. You stand erect, with the chest held
moderately high. (Moderation in all things is the best rule to follow,
no matter what you are doing.) Place the thumbs just above the hips,
with the fingers forward over the waist to note the muscular action.
Then you inhale and exhale and make the sound of "ah" and the sound of
"ah-oo-oh," and, if you aren't self-conscious, you say "wah-we-wi-wa,"
slowly, ten or a dozen times.

"The student should stop at once if signs of dizziness appear," says the
book, but it does not say whether the symptoms are to be looked for in