Again our kindling pulses beat,
With tangled curls our fingers daily,
And bygone beauties smile as sweet
As fresh blown lilies of the valley.

O blessed hour! We may forget

Its wreaths, its rhymes, its songs, its laughter,
But not the loving eyes we met,

Whose light shall gild the dim hereafter.
How every heart to each grows warm!
Is one in sunshine's ray? We share it.
Is one in sorrow's blinding storm?

A look, a word, shall help him bear it.

"The boys we were, "the boys" we'll be
As long as three, as two, are creeping;
Then here's to him-ah! which is he?-
Who lives till all the rest are sleeping.
A life with tranquil comfort blest,

The young man's health, the rich man's plenty.
All earth can give that earth has best,
And heaven at fourscore years and twenty.

-Oliver Wendell Holmes.

BOUNDING THE UNITED STATES

Among the legends of our late Civil War, there is a story of a dinner-party, given by the Americans residing in Paris, at which were propounded sundry toasts, concerning not so much the past and present as the expected glories of the great American nation. In the general character of these toasts, geographical considerations were very prominent, and the principal fact which seemed to occupy the minds of the speakers was the unprecedented bigness of our country.

"Here's to the United States!" said the first speaker, "bounded on the north by British America, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico, on the east by the Atlantic, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean!" "But," said the second speaker, "this is far too limited a view of the subject, and, in assigning our boundaries, we must look to the great and glorious future, which is prescribed for us by the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. Here's to the United States!-bounded on the north by the North

Pole, on the south by the South Pole, on the east by the rising sun, and on the west by the setting sun!'

Emphatic applause greeted the aspiring prophecy. But here arose the third speaker, a very serious gentleman, from the far West. "If we are going," said this truly patriotic American, "to lessen the historic past and present, and take our manifest destiny into account, why restrict ourselves within the narrow limits assigned by our fellowcountryman, who has just sat down? I give you the United States!-bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by the precession of the equinoxes, on the east by primeval chaos, and on the west by the Day of Judgment!"-JOHN FISKE.

PART THREE

THE DELIVERY

CHAPTER XIII

THE OTHER THIRD

"A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." -KING SOLOMON.

WE often hear the remark: "Oh, a speaker will get along all right if he has something to say."

This statement is only a half-truth, and like all half-truths, exceedingly dangerous. A speaker will not get along all right “if he has something to say," without any knowledge of how to say it. In fact, he will get along all wrong-no matter how good his something to say may be. This world is full of men with big ideas which they cannot express-full of scholars who have only "bottled-up knowledge," which they cannot give out effectively to their fellowmen-full of people who are really bubbling and seething inside with a worth-while message, which they cannot express. Now all these people have something to say, but they are so ignorant of the way to deliver it that they are insufferable bores when they face an audience, and no audience will listen to them. Here is a professor-a learned man from the universities, grown gray in a life of research, filled with the wealth of knowledge he has accumulated through the years, a scholar in the truest sense of the word, a specialist of the highest degree-yet he goes out to lecture to an audience of a thousand people and they "walk out on him." Yet these same people are