As soon as he looked up at me I saw by his eyes there was something the matter with his head. I do not know just what, but things have happened since that make it no unkindness to refer to him the way I do. I said: "Please come up and recite something," and he replied: "Shall I recite the same thing the young men have been reciting?" I said, "You don't need to do that; take anything." He left his gold-headed cane—the best part of him—on the floor, and then he came up to the platform and leaned on the table and said to me: "Shall I recite the same thing the young men have been reciting?" I said: "You can if you wish. You are perfectly free to take anything you choose. The professor is away, anyhow. When the cat is away the mice will play."
Then he began to prepare himself for that recitation. I never saw such behavior in my life. He pulled up his sleeves, brushed back his hair, shook himself, moved the table away forward, and I slid far back by the door and left the platform open, for I didn't know what he was going to do next. Then he gave the selection:
"Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper-r-rs;
If Peter Piper, piping piper, picked a peck of pickled pepper-r-r-rs,
Where's the peck of pickled pepper-r-r-rs Peter Piper pickle-picker-r-r picked?"
He rolled in a flutter the letter "r" in each line. That class looked up with awe, and applauded until he repeated it. It was still elocution, but it was not oratory. He thought that oratory consisted of rolling the "r's" and rolling himself. That is not oratory.
Where do they learn oratory? They learn it in the old-fashioned school-house, from that old hen at the kitchen door, in some back office, in some hall, or some church where young men or women get together and debate, saying naturally the things they mean, and then take notice of the effects of what they debate upon, the conviction or after action of those who listen. That is the place to observe. You must take notice if you are to be a great orator.
The greatest orator of the future will be a woman. It has not been two months since the management of a women's Chautauqua said, "We could give $40,000 a year to any woman who will be a natural woman on the platform." They would make money at $40,000 a year if they hired a woman who would be a real woman. The trouble is that when women get on the platform they try to sing bass or try to speak as a man speaks. And there is such a need for women orators now! I get provoked about it when I think. Why isn't there a great woman orator like Mrs. Livermore now when she is needed so much?
Chapter VI. Woman's Influence
If women vote they will be of little account unless they are leaders. It is of no special advantage to the voter to ignorantly put a piece of paper in a box. But it is of great account to influence ten thousand votes. That is what women must do if they are going to exercise their right under suffrage—they must be the influence behind the throne, not merely a voter.
When I was a boy in the district school a substitute teacher came in, and we all loved that little woman. We would do anything she asked us to do. One day that substitute teacher, who could not get a first-class certificate, copied a verse of a poem and asked me to read it:
If you cannot on the ocean
Sail among the swiftest fleet:
Rocking on the mighty billows,
Laughing at the storms you meet.
She asked me to read it once, and then she turned the paper over and said, "Now, Russell, repeat it." I said, "I have not learned it by heart." Said she: "Don't learn it by heart. I will try again." So she wrote the second verse:
If you are too weak to journey
Up the mountain steep and high.
Then she said to me, "Now, Russell, read it through once, and notice carefully each word, and don't look back at a word a second time." I know not now why she demanded that; I have looked in many books of psychology and in many places to find out. I have no explanation of this, and I ask you to think for me, for this is the fact. I took the second verse and read it through as she told me to do. Then she turned it over and said, "Please repeat it." I said, "I cannot repeat it; I have not learned it by heart." She replied: "Don't you say that again. Just shut your eyes and make a mental effort to see those verses, and then read it."
I shut my eyes and said, "Oh, it is all dark." Then she seemed very much disturbed and said: "Now, Russell, don't say that. Won't you try to do what I ask you to do?"
I thought the little woman was going to cry, so I said, "Yes, I will do the best I can." She said, "Shut your eyes again and make a determined effort, with your eyes shut, to see that poetry just as though it were right before you." I shut my eyes and made that effort, and saw it as distinctly as though I had held it before my open eyes. So long as my eyes were shut I could see the two verses, and I read it all through, word for word, and I read it backward, word for word, to the beginning.
I thought I had seen a ghost. I went home and told my father what had happened, and he rushed down from the pasture to the school-house and said to the teacher:
"If you indulge again in your foolish superstitions you will never teach in that school-house again."
It must have been uncomfortable for her, and her secret went down to the grave with her, as far as I know. Yet what would I not give if I could place before the world now what that little girl knew. All our educational institutions, for which I have labored all these years, would be as nothing compared with that one secret if I could give it to you—that secret of being able to look upon a scene and shut's one's eyes and bring it all back again, study it in detail.
I have not had great personal power in that line. But I have seen a man who would take a column of the morning paper and read it down, and hand me the paper and read it through with his eyes shut and scarcely make a mistake. I do not know that I ever saw any one who was infallible, but rarely would he make a mistake. Often he could tell me where the comma, semi-colon, and other marks of punctuation were.
I do not believe there is a normal child who is not mentally capable of that power when he has a teacher who understands how to develop it. That little teacher, who held only a second-class certificate, knew more about psyhology than many of the greatest men who preside over great institutions.
In the Alps some years ago was Professor Slayton, a native of Brighton, England. He was one of the nation's best botanists. His wife died and he was left with a little child between five and six years of age. They boarded at the Hotel Des Alps, in the Chamouni Valley. One morning he took his little girl up to the Mer-de-Glace, and then he told her to run back to the hotel, saying he would return to her in the evening.
She bid her father good-by and saw him go up Mont Blanc into the forest, and she ran back. He did not return in the evening, and she sat up all night and worried, and early in the morning she ran out from the hotel and ran up the stream to the path she had seen her father take. Then, running across, she started climbing up the side of the great snow-capped mountain. She came suddenly to a place where the path ran around along a projecting precipice, two hundred and eighty feet in the perpendicular, around a promontory of rock that set a few feet back. When she came to that spot her feet slipped upon the snow on the glare ice, and she slid down and down over the edge so far that her fingers just caught in the moss on the edge and one foot rested on about an inch projection of the rock.
As she hung there she screamed, "Papa!" Her father heard that cry. He was down in the valley so far that he could not see her, but he could hear her voice. He recognized it, and he felt there was an awful need of him—"humanity called to him." He ran across the valley and up the path. On the way there was a tree near which he had previously noticed there was an ax. He pulled out the ax and ran on to a tree where he had previously observed there was a rope which the coal-burners had long used to