ch a subject as, for instance, the lost
opportunity--oh, the lost opportunity. Anybody in this house who has
reached the turn of life--sixty, or seventy, or even fifty, or
along there--when he goes back along his history, there he finds it
mile-stoned all the way with the lost opportunity, and you know how
pathetic that is.

You younger ones cannot know the full pathos that lies in those
words--the lost opportunity; but anybody who is old, who has really
lived and felt this life, he knows the pathos of the lost opportunity.

Now, I will tell you a story whose moral is that, whose lesson is that,
whose lament is that.

I was in a village which is a suburb of New Bedford several years
ago--well, New Bedford is a suburb of Fair Haven, or perhaps it is the
other way; in any case, it took both of those towns to make a great
centre of the great whaling industry of the first half of the nineteenth
century, and I was up there at Fair Haven some years ago with a friend
of mine.

There was a dedication of a great town-hall, a public building, and we
were there in the afternoon. This great building was filled, like this
great theatre, with rejoicing villagers, and my friend and I started
down the centre aisle. He saw a man standing in that aisle, and he said
"Now, look at that bronzed veteran--at that mahogany-faced man. Now,
tell me, do you see anything about that man's face that is emotional?
Do you see anything about it that suggests that inside that man anywhere
there are fires that can be started? Would you ever imagine that that is
a human volcano?"

"Why, no," I said, "I would not. He looks like a wooden Indian in front
of a cigar store."

"Very well," said my friend, "I will show you that there is emotion even
in that unpromising place. I will just go to that man and I will just
mention in the most casual way an incident in his life. That man is
getting along toward ninety years old. He is past eighty. I will mention
an incident of fifty or sixty years ago. Now, just watch the effect, and
it will be so casual that if you don't watch you won't know when I do
say that thing--but you just watch the effect."

He went on down there and accosted this antiquity, and made a remark
or two. I could not catch up. They were so casual I could not recognize
which one it was that touched that bottom, for in an instant that old
man was literally in eruption and was filling the whole place with
profanity of the most exquisite kind