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 use it for a while with pleasure.  Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to touch it.  By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no longer any sensitiveness about it.  But if we give it up, the calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the novelty and get the blisters.—­The story is often quoted of Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had been preached forty times.  A lecture doesn’t begin to be old until it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have doubled, if not quadrupled, that number.  These old lectures are a man’s best, commonly; they improve by age, also,—­like the pipes, fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day.  One learns to make the most of their strong points and to carry off their weak ones, —­to take out the really good things which don’t tell on the audience, and put in cheaper things that do.  All this degrades him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery.  A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.

—­No, indeed,—­I should be very sorry to say anything disrespectful of audiences.  I have been kindly treated by a great many, and may occasionally face one hereafter.  But I tell you the average intellect of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is not very high.  It may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it is not very rapid or profound.  A lecture ought to be something which all can understand, about something which interests everybody.  I think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives you a different account from this, it will probably be one of those eloquent or forcible speakers who hold an audience by the charm of their manner, whatever they talk about,—­even when they don’t talk very well.