Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/417



blocks. They were singing for about ten minutes, when a policeman came along and rushed the whole company off to jail. We have a saying in the Philippines that our converts do not have any backbone until they have been in jail about three times. They did not have any regular jail, using instead the lower floor in the policeman's house. When they arrived there, Nicholas said: "Well, we are here; I guess we might as well do something"; and they began to sing the first verse of "Nearer, my God, to Thee." The policeman came down-stairs and said that singing must cease, and went back up-stairs. Nicholas said, "I guess we might as well have the second verse," and they began to sing it. The policeman came down again in high dudgeon and berated them most vigorously; and having cooled off, he went up-stairs again. Nicholas said, "We will now have the third verse." The policeman came down again as they were starting in strongly on the third verse. This was too much for the policeman, who said in anger: "Get out of here, and go right back to America. I don't propose to have any psalm-singing Methodists in my jail."—, "Student Volunteer Movement," 1906.

(1755)

LAUGHING PLANT, A

Palgrave, in his work on Central and Eastern Arabia, mentions a plant whose seeds produce effects analogous to those of laughing-gas. The plant is a native of Arabia. A dwarf variety is found at Kasum, and another variety at Oman, which attains a height of from three to four feet, with woody stems, wide-spreading branches, and light green foliage. The flowers are produced in clusters and are yellow in color. The seed-pods contain two or three black seeds of the size and shape of a French bean. Their flavor is a little like that of opium, the taste is sweet, and the odor from them produces a sickening sensation and is slightly offensive. These seeds, when pulverized and taken in small doses, operate on a person in a very peculiar manner. He begins to laugh loudly and boisterously, and then sings, dances, and cuts up all kinds of fantastic capers. The effect continues about an hour, and the patient is extremely comical. When the excitement ceases, the exhausted individual falls into a deep sleep, which continues for an hour or more, and when he awakens, he is utterly unconscious that any such demonstrations have been made by him.—Scientific American.

(1756)

LAUGHTER

Albert J. Beveridge, United States Senator from Indiana, believes that the direction of his career was completely changed by a careless laugh. A writer in Success quotes him as saying:

When I was a youth in Illinois I heard that the Congressman from our district intended to hold an examination to determine what young man he should appoint to West Point. I pitched in and studied hard for that examination, and found it easy when I came to take it. Most of the other fellows seemed to be still struggling with it when I had finished, and I was so confident that I had made few mistakes that I was in a pretty cheerful frame of mind. This is why I laughed when one of the strugglers asked a rather foolish question of the professor in charge. The latter evidently felt that the dignity of the occasion had been trifled with, for he scored one per cent against me. When the papers came to be corrected this loss caused me to fall one-fifth of one per cent below the boy who stood highest on the list. He is a captain in the army now, where I suppose I should be had it not been for that laugh. I believe in the power of cheerfulness. Looking back, I am rather glad that I laughed. (Text.)

(1757)

LAUGHTER AS A VENT

It might be said of Lamb, as of Abraham Lincoln, "laughter was his vent"; if he had not laughed, he would have died of a frenzied brain or of a broken heart. With Lamb the maddest mood of frolic was a rebound from the blackest mood of melancholia; a fact which Carlyle, who did know Lamb's history, might have remembered before he used the phrase "diluted insanity," which, in view of that sad history, is nothing less than brutal.—, "The Makers of English Prose."

(1758)

LAUGHTER, PERILS OF

There is certainly no harm in a good laugh, and truly it is not forbidden to a jester to speak the truth. Yet the laugh must have the right ring to it. Socrates laughed, and Voltaire laughed, as Thomas Erskine remarked; yet, as he said, what a difference in the laugh of the two! And the man who laughs all the time will not know what to do when the hour of weeping comes. The laughing philosopher is a very shallow philosopher or else a very shallow laugher. An awful gravity which comes