destroy. Take time. Don't let your speech resemble those tourists who
try "to do" New York in a day. They spend fifteen minutes looking at the
masterpieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, ten minutes in the
Museum of Natural History, take a peep into the Aquarium, hurry across
the Brooklyn Bridge, rush up to the Zoo, and back by Grant's Tomb--and
call that "Seeing New York." If you hasten by your important points
without pausing, your audience will have just about as adequate an idea
of what you have tried to convey.

Take time, you have just as much of it as our richest multimillionaire.
Your audience will wait for you. It is a sign of smallness to hurry. The
great redwood trees of California had burst through the soil five
hundred years before Socrates drank his cup of hemlock poison, and are
only in their prime today. Nature shames us with our petty haste.
Silence is one of the most eloquent things in the world. Master it, and
use it through pause.

* * * * *

In the following selections dashes have been inserted where pauses may
be used effectively. Naturally, you may omit some of these and insert
others without going wrong--one speaker would interpret a passage in one
way, one in another; it is largely a matter of personal preference. A
dozen great actors have played Hamlet well, and yet each has played the
part differently. Which comes the nearest to perfection is a question
of opinion. You will succeed best by daring to follow your own
course--if you are individual enough to blaze an original trail.

A moment's halt--a momentary taste of being from the well amid
the waste--and lo! the phantom caravan has reached--the nothing