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rous that they are to enjoy with him.
``Be absolutely truthful and scrupulously clear,'' he writes; and with delightfully terse common sense, he says, ``Use illustrations that illustrate''-- and never did an orator live up to this injunction more than does Conwell himself. Nothing is more surprising, nothing is more interesting, than the way in which he makes use as illustrations of the impressions and incidents of his long and varied life, and, whatever it is, it has direct and instant bearing on the progress of his discourse. He will refer to something that he heard a child say in a train yesterday; in a few minutes he will speak of something that he saw or some one whom he met last month, or last year, or ten years ago-- in Ohio, in California, in London, in Paris, in New York, in Bombay; and each memory, each illustration, is a hammer with which he drives home a truth.
The vast number of places he has visited and people he has met, the infinite variety of things his observant eyes have seen, give him his ceaseless flow of illustrations, and his memory and his skill make admirable use of them. It is seldom that he uses an illustration from what he has read; everything is, characteristically, his own. Henry M. Stanley, who knew him well, referred to him as ``that double-sighted Yankee,'' who could ``see at a glance all there is and all there ever was.''
And never was there a man who so supplements with personal reminiscence the place or the person that has figured in the illustration. When he illustrates with the story of the discovery of California gold at Sutter's he almost parenthetically remarks, ``I delivered this lecture on that very spot a few years ago; that is, in the town that arose on that very spot.'' And when he illustrates by the story of the invention of the sewing-machine, he adds: ``I suppose that if any of you were asked who was the inventor of the sewing-machine, you would say that it was Elias Howe. But that would be a mistake. I was with Elias Howe in the Civil War, and
