Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/702



in the silence of the receding world, he heard the great wave breaking on a farther shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning.

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Solar Energy—See ;.

SOLDIER, A TRUE

In the midst of a hot engagement, Napoleon asked one of his aides about the battle. "Sire," said he, "this battle is lost, but," pointing with his sword to the sun still an hour high, "there is still time enough to win another."

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Soldier's Dying Sentiments—See.

SOLIDARITY

Smith's family in Brooklyn went on short allowance, the oldest son was taken out of college, the two daughters gave up their music-teacher, there was no summer vacation. They explained that Smith had lost thirty-six thousand dollars on R. & P. stock. Smith knew that he had lost this money because he was ten minutes late in getting a receipt from the directors.

On a certain day there were twenty-four directors in the head office. They waited vainly for the twenty-fifth. Their half-hour delay was costly to Smith and many others.

Mr. Brown, the twenty-fifth director, was late because his clerk had not brought a certain mail package due on the one-o'clock express. The clerk came at last with the package; the one-o'clock express had arrived late.

Fifty more plans went wrong because the express was late. Men rang up the general manager's office to complain of the annoyance. The manager sent for the conductor. The conductor explained that the fault was a "hot box." Inquiry at Rochester traced the hot-box to the inspector and oiler. He had come late to his work and was only in time to go over half the wheels of the express. The oiler, being questioned, admitted that he was late owing to a sick baby, for whom he had been obliged to go for a doctor. So, in a way, an oiler's sick baby, two hundred miles away, upset Smith and his family, delayed boards of directors, changed Wall Street fortunes. Victor Hugo said that at Waterloo "the universe changed front." But it changes front every time we act. If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.

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The people of the world have a community of interests. Sickness in the slums of a great city, for instance, breeds disease in the whole community:

A man in the city of Chicago was asked why he did not do more to better the condition of the working people in the poorer sections of the city. "What are they to me?" he heartlessly answered. A few weeks later his daughter died of typhoid-fever brought to her in clothing made in the sweat-shops which her father thought it was not his business to try to do away with. (Text.)

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See.

SOLIDITY OF OLD TRUTHS

The fine-grained old truths of religion have been deposited by the world's best life. Its age is theirs; but, altho so many epochs and races went to make them, we use them now without a thought of their age or of the gravity of getting them well-grown; like the beautiful ivory mammoth tusk, sticking six or seven feet out of the frozen ground in Alaska, which the Indians have used for generations as a hitching-post. Tribes come and go, and generations succeed each other; but we all hitch up to the solid truths which offer their convenience, embedded in the past. (Text.)—

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SOLITUDE, LESSON OF

My safety (from madness) lay, as I found, in compressing my thoughts to the smallest compass of mental existence, and no sooner did worldly visions or memories intrude themselves, as they necessarily would, than I immediately and resolutely shut them out as one draws the blind to exclude the light. But this exclusion of the world created a dark background which served only to intensify the light that shone upon me from realms unseen of mortal eyes. Lonely I was, yet I was never alone. (Text.)—Mrs. , "My Fifteen Lost Years."

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SOLITUDE, TRAINING IN

A writer tells of a little bird which would not learn to sing the song its master would have it sing while its cage was full of light. It listened and learned a snatch of this, a trill of that, a polyglot of all the songs of the grove, but never a separate and entire melody of its own. Then the master covered its cage and made it dark; and then it lis