not pay much attention to the wrappings and strings. Get inside to
the goods.

Really, I believe the goods are good. I believe I am to recite to
you some of the multiplication table of life--not mine, not yours
alone, but everybody's.


Can Only Pull the Plug!


Every audience has a different temperature, and that makes a
lecture go differently before every audience. The kind of an
audience is just as important as the kind of a lecture. A cold
audience will make a good lecture poor, while a warm audience will
make a poor lecture good.

Let me illustrate:

When I was a boy we had a barrel of sorghum in the woodshed. When
mother wanted to make ginger-bread or cookies, she would send me to
the woodshed to get a bucket of sorghum from that barrel.

Some warm September day I would pull the plug from the barrel and
the sorghum would fairly squirt into my bucket. Later in the fall
when it was colder, I would pull the plug but the sorghum would not
squirt. It would come out slowly and reluctantly, so that I would
have to wait a long while to get a little sorghum. And on some real
cold winter day I would pull the plug, but the sorghum would not
run at all. It would just look out at me.