○  russell conwell : acres of diamonds  ○

t i might use this without giving them offense. he was a good man, but he thought an office made a man great. he came up and took his seat, adjusted his powerful spectacles, and looked around, when he suddenly spied me sitting there on the front seat.

he came right forward on the platform and invited me up to sit with the town officers. no town officer ever took any notice of me before i went to war, except to advise the teacher to thrash me, and now i was invited up on the stand with the town officers. oh my! the town mayor was then the emperor, the kind of our day and our time. as i came up on the platform they gave me a chair about this far, i would say, from the front. 

when i had got seated, the chairman of the selectmen arose and came forward to the table, and we all supposed he would introduce the congregational minister, who was the only orator in town, and that he would give the oration to the returning soldiers. but, friends, you should have seen the surprise which ran over the audience when they discovered that the old fellow was going to deliver that speech himself. he had never made a speech in his life, but he fell into the same error that hundreds of other men have fallen into. it seems so strange that a man won’t learn he must speak his piece as a boy if he intends to be an orator when he is grown, but he seems to think all he has to do is to hold an office to be a great orator.

so he came up to the front, and brought with him a speech which he had learned by heart walking up and down the pasture, where he had frightened the cattle. he brought the manuscript with him and spread it out on the table so as to be sure he might see it. he adjusted his spectacles and leaned over it for a moment and marched back on that platform, and then came forward like this-tramp, tramp, tramp. he must have studied the subject a great deal, then you come to think of it, because he assumed an “elocutionary” attitude. he rested heavily upon his left

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