Be brief.  An after-dinner audience is in a particularly defenceless position.  It is so out in the open.  There is no opportunity for a quiet nod or two behind a newspaper or the hat of the lady in front.  If you bore your hearers by overstepping your time politeness requires that they sit still and look pleased.  Spare them.  Remember Bacon’s advice to the speaker:  “Let him be sure to leave other men their turns to speak.”  But suppose you come late on the program!  Suppose the other speakers have not heeded Bacon?  What are you going to do about it?  Here is a story that James Bryce tells of the most successful after-dinner speech he remembers to have heard.  The speaker was a famous engineer, the occasion a dinner of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.  “He came last; and midnight had arrived.  His toast was Applied Science, and his speech was as follows:  ’Ladies and gentlemen, at this late hour I advise you to illustrate the Applications of Science by applying a lucifer match to the wick of your bedroom candle.  Let us all go to bed’.”

If you are capable of making a similar sacrifice by cutting short your own carefully-prepared, wise, witty and sparkling remarks, your audience will thank you—­and they may ask you to speak again.

TOASTER’S HANDBOOK

ABILITY

“Pa,” said little Joe, “I bet I can do something you can’t.”

“Well, what is it?” demanded his pa.

“Grow,” replied the youngster triumphantly.—­H.E.  Zimmerman.

ABOLITION

He was a New Yorker visiting in a South Carolina village and he sauntered up to a native sitting in front of the general store, and began a conversation.

“Have you heard about the new manner in which the planters are going to pick their cotton this season?” he inquired.

“Don’t believe I have,” answered the other.

“Well, they have decided to import a lot of monkeys to do the picking,” rejoined the New Yorker.  “Monkeys learn readily.  They are thorough workers, and obviously they will save their employers a small fortune otherwise expended in wages.”

“Yes,” ejaculated the native, “and about the time this monkey brigade is beginning to work smoothly, a lot of you fool northerners will come tearing down here and set ’em free.”

ABSENT-MINDEDNESS

SHE—­“I consider, John, that sheep are the stupidest creatures living.”

HE—­(absent-mindedly)—­“Yes, my lamb.”

ACCIDENTS

The late Dr. Henry Thayer, founder of Thayer’s Laboratory in Cambridge, was walking along a street one winter morning.  The sidewalk was sheeted with ice and the doctor was making his way carefully, as was also a woman going in the opposite direction.  In seeking to avoid each other, both slipped and they came down in a heap.  The polite doctor was overwhelmed and his embarrassment paralyzed his speech, but the woman was equal to the occasion.