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.
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