The best story that I ever heard was one that I was told once in the fall of 1905 (or it may have been 1906), when I was visiting Boston—­at least, I think it was Boston; it may have been Washington (my memory is so bad).

    I happened to run across a most amusing man whose name I
    forget—­Williams or Wilson or Wilkins; some name like that—­and
    he told me this story while we were waiting for a trolley car.

I can still remember how heartily I laughed at the time; and again, that evening, after I had gone to bed, how I laughed myself to sleep recalling the humor of this incredibly humorous story.  It was really quite extraordinarily funny.  In fact, I can truthfully affirm that it is quite the most amusing story I have ever had the privilege of hearing.  Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten it.

Biographical Facts

Public speaking has much to do with personalities; naturally, therefore, the narration of a series of biographical details, including anecdotes among the recital of interesting facts, plays a large part in the eulogy, the memorial address, the political speech, the sermon, the lecture, and other platform deliverances.  Whole addresses may be made up of such biographical details, such as a sermon on “Moses,” or a lecture on “Lee.”

The following example is in itself an expanded anecdote, forming a link in a chain: 

    MARIUS IN PRISON

The peculiar sublimity of the Roman mind does not express itself, nor is it at all to be sought, in their poetry.  Poetry, according to the Roman ideal of it, was not an adequate organ for the grander movements of the national mind.  Roman sublimity must be looked for in Roman acts, and in Roman sayings.  Where, again, will you find a more adequate expression of the Roman majesty, than in the saying of Trajan—­Imperatorem oportere stantem mori—­that Caesar ought to die standing; a speech of imperatorial grandeur!  Implying that he, who was “the foremost man of all this world,”—­and, in regard to all other nations, the representative of his own,—­should express its characteristic virtue in his farewell act—­should die in procinctu—­and should meet the last enemy as the first, with a Roman countenance and in a soldier’s attitude.  If this had an imperatorial—­what follows had a consular majesty, and is almost the grandest story upon record.

Marius, the man who rose to be seven times consul, was in a dungeon, and a slave was sent in with commission to put him to death.  These were the persons,—­the two extremities of exalted and forlorn humanity, its vanward and its rearward man, a Roman consul and an abject slave.  But their natural relations to each other were, by the caprice of fortune, monstrously inverted:  the consul was in chains; the slave was for a moment the arbiter of his fate.  By what spells, what magic, did Marius reinstate himself in his