Page:The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) Holmes.djvu/189

Rh those cities, or almost everybody, has his counterpart here, and in all large places.—You never studied averages as I have had occasion to.

I'll tell you how I came to know so much about averages. There was one season when I was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the week, through most of the lecturing period. I soon found, as most speakers do, that it was pleasanter to work one lecture than to keep several in hand.

Don't you get sick to death of one lecture?—said the landlady's daughter,—who had a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for conversation.

I was going to talk about averages,—I said,—but I have no objection to telling you about lectures, to begin with.

A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its delivery. One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his mind. After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and then disgusted with its repetition. Go on delivering it, and the disgust passes off, until, after one has repeated it a hundred or a hundred and fifty times, he rather enjoys the hundred and first or hundred and fifty-first time, before a new audience. But this is on one condition,—that he never lays the lecture down and lets it cool. If he does, there comes on a loathing for it which is intense, so that the sight of the old battered manuscript is as bad as sea-sickness.

A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We