Mr. William Hunt, who is one of the first artists, say to a class of
teachers, "I shall not try to adapt myself to your various lines of
teaching. I will tell you the best things I know, and you may make the
adaptations." If you will boldly try the experiment of entering, with
anybody you have to talk with, on the thing which at the moment interests
you most, you will find out that other people's hearts are much like your
heart, other people's experiences much like yours, and even, my dear
Justin, that some other people know as much as you know. In short, never
talk down to people; but talk to them from your best thought and your best
feeling, without trying for it on the one hand, but without rejecting it
on the other.

You will be amazed, every time you try this experiment, to find how often
the man or the woman whom you first happen to speak to is the very person
who can tell you just what you want to know. My friend Ingham, who is a
working minister in a large town, says that when he comes from a house
where everything is in a tangle, and all wrong, he knows no way of
righting things but by telling the whole story, without the names, in the
next house he happens to call at in his afternoon walk. He says that if
the Windermeres are all in tears because little Polly lost their
grandmother's miniature when she was out picking blueberries, and if he
tells of their loss at the Ashteroths' where he calls next, it will be
sure that the daughter of the gardener of the Ashteroths will have found
the picture of the Windermeres. Remember what I have taught you,--that
conversation is the providential arrangement for the relief of ignorance.
Only, as in all medicine, the patient must admit that he is ill, or he can
never be cured. It is only in "Patronage,"--which I am so sorry you boys
and girls will not read,--and in other poorer novels, that the leech
cures, at a distance, patients who say they need no physician. Find out
your ignorance, first; admit it frankly, second; be ready to recognize