classes who did not open his lips properly when he spoke. So I asked
him to prop his mouth open with a piece of stick and then talk. I made
him do it until he learned to speak much more clearly. A famous Greek
orator, named Demosthenes, who had a habit of mumbling his words,
trained himself to speak clearly by putting pebbles in his mouth and
then reciting in a loud voice.

When you want your voices to sound pleasant,--and that is always, of
course,--you must call on your brain to help. That is your thinking
machine. Always think twice before you let anything unpleasant or
unkind come out of your voice box. How happy we could make everyone
about us if we followed this rule!


VIII. THINKING AND ANSWERING

Suppose, as you are walking home from school to-day, you are about to
cross the street when you see an automobile coming very fast. What do
you do? You stop, of course; wait for it to go by, and then start on
again. Why do you stop? "Why," you say, "if I didn't, the automobile
might run over me." Something of that sort would just flash through
your mind, wouldn't it, in the very same second that you first saw the
automobile coming. Now, as you know, you think with your brain. But
what was it this time that set your brain to thinking? "Nothing," you
say, "I just saw the automobile coming." And that is true in a way:
you didn't need anything more than your eyes to tell you.

But how did your eyes get the message to your brain, and how did your
brain tell your legs to stop walking? We must have in our bodies a
kind of telephone system. And that is, in fact, just what we have. Our