owing machines and every known triumph of art on one side;
on the other the highest type of the world's creation, a beautiful
woman, the stars of nature stooping to kiss her brow, and laughing
waters of nature leaping to kiss her feet; where your eyes would rest
there let your decision be given."

After the debate a friend said to me: "It was that last home picture
that saved you." My father who heard the remark said, "Yes, a picture
of a red-headed girl washing her feet in a goose branch." I may add, I
was careful after the contest not to get very near the young lady with
whom I had taken such platform liberty.

Reason, rhetoric, pathos, poetry, diction, gesture, wit and humor,
each has its place on the platform. While logic sounds the depths of
thought, humor ripples its surface with laughing wavelets. While
reason cultivates the cornfields of the mind, rhetoric beautifies the
pleasure gardens.

John B. Gough was the most popular platform orator of his day. He
began lecturing at from two to five dollars an evening. He grew in
popularity until he was in demand at five hundred dollars a lecture,
and no one before or since more successfully used all the arts of the
platform, from the comic that drew the very rabble of the streets, to
flights of eloquence that captured college culture. It has been well
said: "While Gough was a great preacher of righteousness, he was a
whole theatre in dramatic delivery." Lecturers, like preachers, are
fishers of men, and there are as many kinds of people in an average
audience as there are kinds of fish in the sea. It requires variety of
bait for humanity as well as for fish.

Sam Jones used slang as one kind of bait and he used to say: "It beats
all how it draws." I saw this verified at Ottawa, Kansas, Chautauqua.
Giving a Saturday evening lecture he baited the platform with slang,
satire and humor. Sunday afternoon an hour before time for his lecture
the people were hurrying to the auditorium. When presented to the
great audience he said: "Record! Record! Record!" I remember the
sermon as one of the sweetest and most powerful I ever heard. Its
influence will not cease this side the eternal morning.

Rowland Hill, the popular London preacher, used quaint humor to draw
the people, and powerful appeal to sweep them into the kingdom.

It is said the fountain of laughter and fountain of tears lie very
close together. My experience has been, that often the best way to the
fountain of t