No town officer ever took any
notice of me before I went to war, except to advise
the teacher to thrash me, and now I was invited
up on the stand with the town officers. Oh my!
the town mayor was then the emperor, the king
of our day and our time. As I came up on the
platform they gave me a chair about this far, I
would say, from the front.
When I had got seated, the chairman of
the Selectmen arose and came forward to the
table, and we all supposed he would introduce
the Congregational minister, who was the only
orator in town, and that he would give the oration
to the returning soldiers. But, friends, you should
have seen the surprise which ran over the audience
when they discovered that the old fellow
was going to deliver that speech himself. He had
never made a speech in his life, but he fell into
the same error that hundreds of other men have
fallen into. It seems so strange that a man won't
learn he must speak his piece as a boy if he in-
tends to be an orator when he is grown, but he
seems to think all he has to do is to hold an office
to be a great orator.
So he came up to the front, and brought with
him a speech which he had learned by heart
walking up and down the pasture, where he had
frightened the cattle.
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