But an average, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of the most extraordinary subjects of observation and study.  It is awful in its uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action.  Two communities of ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions, so far as we can see.  Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell the “remarkably intelligent audience” of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England town of similar size.  Of course, if any principle of selection has come in, as in those special associations of young men which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage.  But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes in.  Front seats:  a few old folk,—­shiny-headed,—­slant up best ear towards the speaker,—­drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid.  Bright women’s faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front—­(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that.) Here and there a countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about.  An indefinite number of pairs of young people,—­happy, but not always very attentive.  Boys, in the background, more or less quiet.  Dull faces here, there,—­in how many places!  I don’t say dull people, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression.  They are what kill the lecturer.  These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;—­that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over.  They render latent any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on our hearts.

Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,—­a great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two mammals of the same species are like each other.  Each audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all.  Even those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse’s cocking his ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture always.  I declare to you, that as the monk said about the picture in the convent,—­that he sometimes thought the living tenants were the shadows, and the painted figures the realities,—­I have sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy incantation!