Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/327



A little girl had been promised a handsome Bible for her birthday. On hearing a missionary tell of the need of Bibles in India, the child asked if she might not have two Bibles, each half as handsome as the one her mother was planning to give her. Her mother consented and the little girl wrote her name in one of them and gave it to the missionary to send to India. Years afterward a lady missionary was telling the story of the love of Jesus to a few women, when one of them exclaimed: "Oh, I know all about that. I have a book which tells me these things." She brought the book to the missionary, who, on opening it, saw with astonishment her own name on the fly-leaf! It was the very birthday Bible she had sent out years before as a little girl and it had led to the conversion of its reader. (Text.)

(1356)

Harvest-raising—See. Haste—See. HASTE WITHOUT SELF-CONTROL  Emerson, in his acute observations on manners, declares that there is nothing "so inelegant as haste," meaning by this the haste which is a hurry. Haste which the occasion demands is never undignified. A fireman running to a fire is a rather inspiriting sight. We would despise him if he walked. It is rushing in the ordinary affairs of life, which demand deliberation, steadiness, control, that destroys dignity and so destroys good manners. The man in a hurry, we feel at once, is so because he is not master of the situation. He would not be compelled to gorge his breakfast, to walk so fast that he looks like an animated wagon-wheel, or to slight his work, if he had his affairs in control.—Chautauquan.

(1357)

Hasty Action—See.

HAVOC THAT SPREADS

Vernon L. Kellogg points out how the evil of the great grasshopper plague that visited some Western States about forty years ago, entailed disaster on the whole country:

Over thousands and thousands of square miles of the great granary of the land were spread the hordes of hoppers. Farmers and stockmen were being ruined. Then the storekeepers and bankers that sell things and lend money to the farmers. Then the lawyers and doctors that depend on the farmers' troubles to earn a living. Then the millers and stock-brokers and capitalists of the great cities that make their fortunes out of handling and buying and selling the grains the farmers send in long trains to the centers of population. Everybody, the whole country, was aghast and appalled at the havoc of the hopper. (Text.)—"Insect Stories."

(1358)

Head-hunters—See.

Headlight Requirements—See.

HEADS, LOSING

I was preaching for a single Sabbath in Brooklyn. In the course of my discourse I lost my head; in fact, I lost all of them. Three were on paper, and one on my shoulders; and they all went at once.

I tried to remember what I had had in my head, but, like the old king's dream, the matter had gone from me.

I tried to decipher what I had put upon paper, but the writing had faded out.

Everything was gone except the audience, and I could have wished that they were gone, too.

I pounded the desk; I pawed the floor; I clawed the air. I poured whole broadsides of big dictionary into those long-suffering people, but without a single scintilla of sense.

At last I struck a line of thought, and clutched it with the grip of despair, and pulled myself out of the hole in which I had been floundering, and then limped along to a "lame conclusion."

And then so mortified was I that I would have sunk through the floor, could I have found a vacant nail-hole. As that was out of the question, I would fain have sneaked away without speaking to a human being; but, as bad luck would have it, I had promised to go home to dinner with the Hon. William Richardson, one of the most cultured members of the congregation.

We walked some distance before either spoke a word. Finally, I broke silence—I felt like breaking everything in sight—and I said, "Richardson, was not that the very worst you ever heard?"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Mean?" I replied, catching savagely at the word. "'Mean' is no name for it. You