pauses for several hours that the water may soak in. The physician puts cocaine

on your turbinates--and pauses to let it take hold before he removes them. Why

do we use this principle everywhere except in the communication of ideas? If you

have given the audience a big idea, pause for a second or two and let them turn

it over. See what effect it has. After the smoke clears away you may have to

fire another 14-inch shell on the same subject before you demolish the citadel

of error that you are trying to destroy. Take time. Don't let your speech

resemble those tourists who try "to do" New York in a day. They spend fifteen

minutes looking at the masterpieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, ten

minutes in the Museum of Natural History, take a peep into the Aquarium, hurry

across the Brooklyn Bridge, rush up to the Zoo, and back by Grant's Tomb--and

call that "Seeing New York." If you hasten by your important points without

pausing, your audience will have just about as adequate an idea of what you have

tried to convey.

 

Take time, you have just as much of it as our richest multimillionaire. Your

audience will wait for you. It is a sign of smallness to hurry. The great

redwood trees of California had burst through the soil five hundred years before

Socrates drank his cup of hemlock poison, and are only in their prime today.

Nature shames us with our petty haste. Silence is one of the most eloquent

things in the world. Master it, and use it through pause.

 

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In the following selections dashes have been inserted where pauses may be used