plurges and spasms. I bedecked it with
metaphors and semaphores. I filled it with climaxes, both wet and dry.
I had a fine wet climax on page fourteen, where I had made a little
mark in the margin which meant "cry here." This was the spilling-point
of the wet climax. I was to cry on the lefthand side of the page.

I committed it all to memory, and then went to a lady who taught
expression, to get it expressed. You have to get it expressed.

I got the most beautiful gestures nailed into almost every page. You
know about gestures--these things you make with your arms in the air as
you speak. You can notice it on me yet.

I am not sneering at expression. Expression is a noble art. All life is
expression. But you have to get something to express. Here I made my
mistake. I got a lot of fine gestures. I got an express-wagon and got
no load for it. So it rattled. I got a necktie, but failed to get any
man to hang it upon. I got up before a mirror for six weeks, day by
day, and said the sermon to the glass. It got so it would run itself. I
could have gone to sleep and that sermon would not have hesitated.

Then came the grand day. The boy wonder stood forth and before his
large and enthusiastic concourse delivered that maiden sermon more
grandly than ever to a mirror. Every gesture went off the bat according
to the blueprint. I cried on page fourteen! I never knew it was in me.
But I certainly got it all out that day!

Then I did another fine thing, I sat down. I wish now I had done that
earlier. I wish now I had sat down before I got up. I was the last man
out of the church--and I hurried. But they beat me out--all nine of
them. When I went out the door, the old sexton said as he jiggled the
key in the door to hurry me, "Don't feel bad, bub, I've heerd worse
than that. You're all right, bub, but you don't know nothin' yet."

I cried all the way to town. If he had plunged a dagger into me he
would not have hurt me so much. It has taken some years to learn that
the old man was right. I had wonderful truth in that sermon. No sermon
ever had greater truth, but I had not lived it. The old man meant I did
not know my own sermon.

So, children, when you prepare your commencement oration, write about
what you know best, what you have lived. If you know more about peeling
potatoes than about anything else, write about "Peeling Potatoes," and
you are most likely to hear the applause peal from that part of your
audience un