The Art of Lecturing

, as I am today, but in those days Debs was my fireman. Having a little better job than he, I naturally thought I was the smarter man. We used to sleep in the same room. We would both turn in all tired from a long trip and I would be asleep before you could count ten. After I had slept three or four hours I would wake up about two in the morning and there would be Debs with a candle, shaded so as not to disturb me, reading away at a book as if everything depended on his understanding all there was in it. Many a time he only got one or two hours' rest before going to work again.

"I told him he was a d--d fool, and I thought he was. I still believe there was a d--d fool in that room, but I know now that it wasn't Debs."

Every man who ever did anything really worth while on the lecture platform has something like that in his life story, and it is usually connected with his earlier years.

The biography of every great speaker or writer has usually this passage or one equal to it in the early p