Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/218

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up the wind; and two or three speeches at noon, just before luncheon and four or five more in the evening after dinner may be recommended as an excellent course in physical culture, if when one is done one's speeches for the evening one will go home and, for an hour, read, say "Huckleberry Finn" or "Tom Sawyer" before he goes to bed. I can recommend these two great American novels with entire confidence in their power to refresh, and in their deep and true and delightful philosophy to correct aberrations in the point of view—of one's self, in the first place, and of some other things of much more importance than one's self. If the cause be one in which one believes there is an incomparable exhilaration in it all. And it was with some pride that I came through that first campaign without having lost either my temper or my voice.

There must always remain the memory of those throngs in the meetings, those working men who came pouring out of the shops and factories at noon, glad as school boys to be released for a little while from toil, laughing, whistling, engaging in rude pleasantries, jostling, teasing and joking each other, and then, suddenly, pausing, gathering about the motor car, drawing closer, pressing up to the foot-board, and listening, with eager, intent faces, in which there was such instant appreciation of a joke, a pleasantry, anything to make them laugh, and yet somehow the adumbration of a yearning and a hope. Lyman Wachenheimer—who as judge of the police court once had fined Jones for contempt of court, but had come later to agree with