rs follow the wrist. How
embarrassing at a commencement for the fingers not to follow the wrist!
It is always a shock to the audience when the wrist sweeps downward and
the fingers remain up in the air. So by all means, let the fingers
follow the wrist, just as the elocution teacher marked on page 69.)

Applause, especially from relatives.

Sweet Girl Graduate Number 2, generally comes second. S. G. G. No. 2
stands at the same leadpencil mark on the floor, resplendent in a filmy
creation caught with something or other.

"We (hands at half-mast and separating) are rowing (business of
propelling aerial boat with two fingers of each hand, head inclined).
We are not drifting (hands slide downward)."

Children, we are not laughing at you. We are laughing at ourselves. We
are laughing the happy laugh at how we have learned these great truths
that you have memorized, but not vitalized.

You get the most beautiful and sublime truths from Emerson's essays.
(How did they ever have commencements before Emerson?) But that is not
knowing them. You cannot know them until you have lived them. It is a
grand thing to say, "Beyond the Alps lieth Italy," but you can never
really say that until you know it by struggling up over Alps of
difficulty and seeing the Italy of promise and victory beyond. It is
fine to say, "We are rowing and not drifting," but you cannot really
say that until you have pulled on the oar.

O, Gussie, get an oar!

My Maiden Sermon

Did you ever hear a young preacher, just captured, just out of a
factory? Did you ever hear him preach his "maiden sermon"? I wish you
had heard mine. I had a call. At least, I thought I had a call. I think
now I was "short-circuited." The "brethren" waited upon me and told me
I had been "selected": Maybe this was a local call, not long distance.

They gave me six weeks in which to load the gospel gun and get ready
for my try-out. I certainly loaded it to the muzzle.

But I made the mistake I am trying to warn you against. Instead of
going to the one book where I might have gotten a sermon--the book of
my experience, I went to the books in my father's library. "As the poet
Shakespeare has so beautifully said," and then I took a chunk of
Shakespeare and nailed it on page five of my sermon. "List to the poet
Tennyson." Come here, Lord Alfred. So I soldered these fragments from
the books together with my own native genius. I worked that sermon up
into the most beautiful s