" And then to the audience:
"Is Mrs. John Smith in the house? Her husband has slipped on the ice and
broken his leg."
And you could see the Mrs. John Smiths get up everywhere and drift out of
the house, and it made great gaps everywhere. Then Doctor Hayes began
again: "When a lonely man, a pigmy in the architecture--" The janitor
came in again and shouted: "It is not Mrs. John Smith! It is Mrs. John
Jones!"
Then all the Mrs. Jones got up and left. Once more the speaker started,
and was in the midst of the sentence when he was interrupted again, and
the result was that the lecture was not delivered. But the lecturer
interviewed the janitor afterward in a private room, and of the fragments
of the janitor they took "twelve basketsful."
Now, I don't want to sit down just in this way. I have been talking with
so much levity that I have said no serious thing, and you are really no
better or wiser, although Robert Buchanan has suggested that I am a
person who deals in wisdom. I have said nothing which would make you
better than when you came here.
I should be sorry to sit down without having said one serious word which
you can carry home and relate to your children and the old people who are
not able to get away.
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