college chair and had to address the Owl's Club. It is a penalty
that all new professors pay; and the Owls batten upon them like
bats. It is one of the compensations of age that I am free of the
Owl's Club forever. But in the days when I still had to address
them, I used to take it out of the Owls in a speech, delivered, in
imagination only and not out loud, to the assembled meeting of the
seventeen Owls, after the chairman had made his concluding remarks.
It ran as follows:

"Gentlemen--if you are such, which I doubt. I realise that the paper
which I have read on "Was Hegel a deist?" has been an error. I spent
all the winter on it and now I realise that not one of you pups know
who Hegel was or what a deist is. Never mind. It is over now, and I
am glad. But just let me say this, only this, which won't keep you a
minute. Your chairman has been good enough to say that if I come
again you will get together a capacity audience to hear me. Let me
tell you that if your society waits for its next meeting till I come
to address you again, you will wait indeed. In fact, gentlemen--I say
it very frankly--it will be in another world."

But I pass over the audience. Suppose there is a real audience,
and suppose them all duly gathered together. Then it becomes the
business of that gloomy gentleman--facetiously referred to in the
newspaper reports as the "genial chairman"--to put the lecturer to
the bad. In nine cases out of ten he can do so. Some chairmen,
indeed, develop a great gift for it. Here are one or two examples
from my own experience:

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the chairman of a society in a little
country town in Western Ontario, to which I had come as a paid (a