Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/373



waiting the return of the tide. But when the tide comes and strikes the pebbles not a drop of the water enters them, thousands of years they have rolled up and down there, wearing smoother and growing more impervious all the time. But at the first touch of the incoming tide the sponges drink themselves full.

There is the same difference in men. Tides of spiritual influence flow around some men and they keep growing harder—the same tides fill and transform others.

(1557)

See.

IMPRESSIONS, EARLY

The things children most quickly note and in which they take most interest may indicate their bent of mind and help parents and instructors to shape their education along lines of least resistance. Thus R. H. Haweis says:

"Long before I had ever touched a violin I was fascinated with its appearance. In driving to town as a child—when, standing up in the carriage, I could just look out of the window—certain fiddle-shops hung with mighty rows of violoncellos attracted my attention. I had dreams of these large editions—these patriarchs of the violin, as they seemed to me. I compared them in my mind with the smaller tenors and violins. I dreamed about their brown, big, dusty bodies and affable good-natured-looking heads and grinning faces. These violin shops were the great points watched for on each journey up to London from Norwood, where I spent my early days."

(1558)

Impressions Permanent—See.

Impression, Vivid—See.

IMPRISONED LIVES

In the Persian desert the sad sight may be seen of brick pillars in which many an unfortunate victim has been walled up alive, as a horrible method of inflicting capital punishment. Some awful tales of cruelties perpetrated here are told. The victim is put into the pillar, which is half built up in readiness, then, if merciful, the executioner will cement quickly up to the face, when death comes speedily; but sometimes the torture is prolonged, and the inmate has been heard groaning and calling for water for three days.

How many lives are walled lives—built around and bricked in by torturing limitations that suffocate joy and hope, and are no more than a lingering death!

(1559)

IMPROVED CONDITIONS

In a district of Glasgow where the death-rate used to be forty in a thousand, sanitation has brought it down to twenty-eight, and it has been brought down to seventeen or eighteen in some parts of London. Boston reduced its death-rate from thirty-one to twenty, and Croydon, Eng., from twenty-eight to thirteen. Even the friction-match has had its share in prolonging life. "Doubtless many a fatal pneumonia and pleurisy has been contracted when the luckless house-*holder's lire had died out overnight, and he was struggling with flint, steel and tinder-*box." In London during the last century nearly two hundred thousand persons perished of smallpox. Macaulay says that a person without a pitted face was the exception. But, thanks largely to vaccination, in a recent year there were only fourteen cases of smallpox among New York's inhabitants, and in the German army, where vaccination is compulsory, the dread disease has been eradicated. The production of pure water by distillation has done much to abolish alimentary diseases among sailors at sea, and lime-juice defends them from scurvy. When the first emigrant ships went out to Australia, one-third of the passengers perished on the voyage, but when the ship-owners were forced to alter their terms and receive pay only for those they landed safely, the death-rate became smaller than when these same persons were living upon shore. In Queen Elizabeth's time, one in two thousand of her London subjects was murdered annually. At the same rate there would be 2,500 murders every year in London now, whereas the number is no more than twelve. This is what the lighter street and a more efficient police have done for the British metropolis. Facts like these are a most wholesome and agreeable corrective for the lament over the departure of the "good old times," so much affected by the cynic and the pessimist.—Boston Journal.

(1560)