one pretext or another,
and you will notice that while we are absent there is a pleasing
tranquillity in America--a building up of public confidence. We are
doing the best we can for our country. I think we have spent our lives
in serving our country, and we never serve it to greater advantage than
when we get out of it.

But impromptu speaking--that is what I was trying to learn. That is a
difficult thing. I used to do it in this way. I used to begin about a
week ahead, and write out my impromptu, speech and get it by heart. Then
I brought it to the New England dinner printed on a piece of paper in my
pocket, so that I could pass it to the reporters all cut and dried,
and in order to do an impromptu speech as it should be done you have to
indicate the places for pauses and hesitations. I put them all in it.
And then you want the applause in the right places.

When I got to the place where it should come in, if it did not come in
I did not care, but I had it marked in the paper. And these masters of
mind used to wonder why it was my speech came out in the morning in the
first person, while theirs went through the butchery of synopsis.

I do that kind of speech (I mean an offhand speech), and do it well,
and make no mistake in such a way to deceive the audience completely and
make that audience believe it is an impromptu speech--that is art.

I was frightened out of it at last by an experience of Doctor Hayes. He
was a sort of Nansen of that day. He had been to the North Pole, and it
made him celebrated. He had even seen the polar bear climb the pole.

He had made one of those magnificent voyages such as Nansen made, and in
those days when a man did anything which greatly distinguished him for
the moment he had to come on to the lecture platform and tell all about
it.

Doctor Hayes was a great, magnificent creature like Nansen, superbly
built. He was to appear in Boston. He wrote his lecture out, and it was
his purpose to read it from manuscript; but in an evil hour he concluded
that it would be a good thing to preface it with something rather
handsome, poetical, and beautiful that he could get off by heart and
deliver as if it were the thought of the moment.

He had not had my experience, and could not do that. He came on the
platform, held his manuscript down, and began with a beautiful piece of
oratory. He spoke something like this:

"When a lonely human being, a pigmy in the midst of the architecture
of nat