Oh yes, some people have tastes and intelligence also.
Now, I was going to make a speech--I supposed I was, but I am not. It is late, late; and so I am going to tell a story; and there is this advantage about a story, anyway, that whatever moral or valuable thing you put into a speech, why, it gets diffused among those involuted sentences and possibly your audience goes away without finding out what that valuable thing was that you were trying to confer upon it; but, dear me, you put the same jewel into a story and it becomes the keystone of that story, and you are bound to get it--it flashes, it flames, it is the jewel in the toad's head--you don't overlook that.
Now, if I am going to talk on such a subject as, for instance, the lost opportunity--oh, the lost opportunity. Anybody in this house who has reached the turn of life--sixty, or seventy, or even fifty, or along there--when he goes back along his history, there he finds it mile-stoned all the way with the lost opportunity, and you know how pathetic that is.
You younger ones cannot know the full pathos that lies in those words-- the lost opportunity; but anybody who is old, who has really lived and felt this life, he knows the pathos of the lost opportunity.
Now, I will tell you a story whose moral is that, whose lesson is that, whose lament is that.
I was in a village which is a suburb of New Bedford several years ago-- well, New Bedford is a suburb of Fair Haven, or perhaps it is the other way; in any case, it took both of those towns to make a great centre of the great whaling industry of the first half of the nineteenth century, and I was up there at Fair Haven some years ago with a friend of mine.
There was a dedication of a great town-hall, a public building, and we were there in the afternoon. This great building was filled, like this great theatre, with rejoicing villagers, and my friend and I started down the centre aisle. He saw a man standing in that aisle, and he said "Now, look at that bronzed veteran--at that mahogany-faced man. Now, tell me, do you see anything about that man's face that is emotional? Do you see anything about it that suggests that inside that man anywhere there are fires that can be started? Would you ever imagine that that is a human volcano?"
"Why, no," I said, "I would not. He looks like a wooden Indian in front of a cigar store."
"Very well," said my friend, "I will show you that there is emotion even in that unpromising place. I will just go to that man and I will just mention in the most casual way an incident in his life. That man is getting along toward ninety years old. He is past eighty. I will mention an incident of fifty or sixty years ago. Now, just watch the effect, and it will be so casual that if you don't watch you won't know when I do say that thing--but you just watch the effect."
He went on down there and accosted this antiquity, and made a remark or two. I could not catch up. They were so casual I could not recognize which one it was that touched that bottom, for in an instant that old man was literally in eruption and was filling the whole place with profanity of the most exquisite kind. You never heard such accomplished profanity. I never heard it also delivered with such eloquence.
I never enjoyed profanity as I enjoyed it then--more than if I had been uttering it myself. There is nothing like listening to an artist--all his passions passing away in lava, smoke, thunder, lightning, and earthquake.
Then this friend said to me: "Now, I will tell you about that. About sixty years ago that man was a young fellow of twenty-three, and had just come home from a three years' whaling voyage. He came into that village of his, happy and proud because now, instead of being chief mate, he was going to be master of a whaleship, and he was proud and happy about it.
"Then he found that there had been a kind of a cold frost come upon that town and the whole region roundabout; for while he had been away the Father Mathew temperance excitement had come upon the whole region. Therefore, everybody had taken the pledge; there wasn't anybody for miles and miles around that had not taken the pledge.