feel that you have
been listening to a real man, and not to an actor; his sentiments have a
wholesome earth-smell in them, though, very likely, this apparent
naturalness is as much an art as what we expend in rounding a sentence
or elaborating a peroration.

It is one good effect of this inartificial style, that nobody in England
seems to feel any shyness about shovelling the untrimmed and untrimmable
ideas out of his mind for the benefit of an audience. At least, nobody
did on the occasion now in hand, except a poor little Major of
Artillery, who responded for the Army in a thin, quavering voice, with a
terribly hesitating trickle of fragmentary ideas, and, I question not,
would rather have been bayoneted in front of his batteries than to have
said a word. Not his own mouth, but the cannon's, was this poor Major's
proper organ of utterance.

While I was thus amiably occupied in criticizing my fellow-guests, the
Mayor had got up to propose another toast; and listening rather
inattentively to the first sentence or two, I soon became sensible of a
drift in his Worship's remarks that made me glance apprehensively
towards Sergeant Wilkins. "Yes," grumbled that gruff personage, shoving
a decanter of Port towards me, "it is your turn next"; and seeing in my
face, I suppose, the consternation of a wholly unpractised orator, he
kindly added,--"It is nothing. A mere acknowledgment will answer the
purpose. The less you say, the better they will like it." That being the
case, I suggested that perhaps they would like it best, if I said
nothing at all. But the Sergeant shook his head. Now, on first receiving
the Mayor's invitation to dinner, it had occurred to me that I might
possibly be brought into my present predicament; but I had dismissed the
idea from my mind as too disagreeable to be entertained, and, moreover,
as so alien from my disposition and character that Fate surely could not
keep such a misfortune in store for me. If nothing else prevented, an
earthquake or the crack of doom would certainly interfere before I need
rise to speak. Yet here was the Mayor getting on inexorably,--and,
indeed, I heartily wished that he might get on and on forever, and of
his wordy wanderings find no end.

If the gentle reader, my kindest friend and closest confidant, deigns to
desire it, I can impart to him my own experience as a public speaker
quite as indifferently as if it concerned another person. Indeed, it
does concern another, or