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LESSON XLVII

Stern feeling includes firmness, haughtiness, reproof, anger, contempt, and any feeling of hardness, in which the speaker does not lose self-control. Uncontrolled anger, etc., is classed under Fierceness.

He has charged me with being connected with the rebels. The charge is utterly, totally and meanly false.

ten.

Pilate answered: What I have written I have writ

Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.

Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home. Is this a holiday? What! know you not, being mechanical, you ought not walk upon a laboring day without the sign of your profession?

But when the king came in to behold the guests, he saw there a man who had not on a wedding-garment: and he said unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding-garment? And he was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and cast him out into the outer darkness; there shall be the weeping and gnashing of teeth.-Matthew 22:11-13.

The fathomless, dominant gaze caught and held his eyes. "Mr. Eaton, I came here to crush Ridgway. I am going to stay here till I do. I'm going to wipe him from the map of Montana-ruin him so utterly that he can never recover. It has been my painful duty to do this with a hundred men as strong and as confident as he is. After undertaking such an enterprise, I have never faltered and never relented. The men I have ruined were ruined beyond hope of recovery. None of them have ever struggled to their feet again. I intend to make Waring Ridgway a pauper.

Stephen Eaton could conceive nothing more merciless than the calm certainty of his unemphasized words. William MacLeod Raine.

This feeling of hardness shows itself in the tense and rigid condition of the whole body, as well as in the con

tracted muscles of the neck and throat. Indeed the hardness in the mind acts upon the body and makes it rigid, and this muscular contraction involuntarily influences the vocal organs and makes the tones tense, harsh, and metallic.

Caution is very needful here lest you rasp and strain the delicate vocal organs, and produce rawness and hoarseness. If your bearing be rigid, its tenseness will make the voice sufficiently hard without any effort to contract the neck muscles or rasp the cords. The attitude inclines to antagonism.

Read Gradgrind's Idea of Education, (page 79) expressing the stern feeling without straining your voice.

EXERCISES

Describe exercise 38 so clearly that new students would know how and why to practice it.

Lead the class.

LESSON XLVIII

Awesome feeling is the emotion caused by vastness, horror, solemnity, deep reverence, dread, or by a sense of the presence of something superhuman.

Vastness or grandeur produces elevated feeling if it exhilerates us, but if it weighs us down, or hushes us with a sense of our own littleness,-that is awesome feeling. The speaker feels awed and overpowered, almost stunned, he shrinks into himself, and lets his feelings express themselves as if he were alone, rather than addressing others. His attitude naturally suggests recoil; his voice is shut in and half smothered, it is a hollow reverberation within the chest. We find passages with traces of this awesome feeling more often than fully developed examples of it.

Jehovah is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.-Habakkuk 2:29.

Shortly after Mr. Lincoln was shot, his cousin, Dennis Hanks, was in his shop pegging away on a shoe, when somebody stepped in and said: "Dennis, Honest Abe is dead!" "Dead, dead, Old Abe dead! To strike him after the war was over! I can't believe it!"

It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. I listened, I looked around me, could hear nothing, nor see anything. I went up to a rising ground, to look farther. I went up the shore, and down the shore, but it was all one; I could see no other impression but that one. I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the very print of a foot,-toes, heel and every part of a foot. How it came thither I knew not, nor could in the least imagine. But after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a dis

tance to be a man; nor is it possible to describe how many various shapes affrighted imagination represented thing to me in, how many wild ideas were found every moment in my fancy, and what strange, unaccountable whimsies came into my thoughts by the way.-Robinson Crusoe.

While climbing the upper summits of the mountains of Sinai, I was led by an Arab guide who was familiar with every step of the perilous way. Finally we came to the edge of a threatening precipice of granite, which sloped away from our very feet far down to a yawning ravine of jagged rocks below. Closer and closer to that dizzy edge lay our narrow path, until the path actually 1ost itself, at a point where a jutting crag before us seemed to forbid all passage, unless directly over the mad precipice itself. And there my guide disappeared, for the moment. He had swung around that crag, and was now above and beyond the path he had left.

As I stood for a moment, with whirling brain, at that appalling brink of death, I saw, just above and before me, the wiry feet of my trusty guide beyond that jutting crag; and I heard his voice calling out cheerily: "Cling to my feet, and swing yourself over the pass! I can hold you! Have no fear!"

It was not a tempting thing to do. But it was that or nothing. I caught at those sturdy ankles with a grip as for my life! A moment's stay of breath! One spring along the frightful edge! The crag and the chasm were passed, and I and my guide were together safe on the solid rock. -Henry Clay Trumbull.

In India, where magic is a recognized business, handed down from father to son, there are thousands of jugglers. They roam about the country playing their tricks, which are in some cases more wonderful than the feats of civilized magicians. The Indian juggler has no elaborate paraphernalia. All his appliances are contained in a cotton bag. He is nearly naked, and his stage is the floor of a verandah or the bare ground. Yet he performs such tricks as the following:

The man took an oblong basket about two feet long, one foot broad, and say a foot and a half high. He had a woman with him, and this woman was bound hand and foot with ropes, and put into a net made of rope, which was securely tied. She was then lifted and placed in the basket on her knees. The whole of the woman's person, from the loins upwards, was above the basket.

The woman bent her head: the juggler placed the lid of the basket on her shoulders, and then threw a sheet over the whole. In about a minute he pulled away the sheet, folding it up in his hands, and behold! the lid was in its proper place, and the woman was gone!

The juggler now took a sword about five feet long, and with it he pierced the basket through and through in all directions, but there was no sign of any one inside. He even removed the lid, jumped into the basket with his feet, and danced in it. He now took the sheet, and after we had examined it, spread it over the basket, holding it tent-shaped, the apex where his hand was being about three feet from the ground. In a minute he withdrew the sheet, and behold! the woman was back in her old position on her knees in the basket; but the ropes and net had disappeared, and she was now unbound.

Our juggler showed us a parched skin which had once belonged to a large cobra. We examined it, and were sure it was a serpent's skin and nothing more. He placed this skin in a circular straw basket about six inches deep. The basket was likewise examined, and we found no double bottom or any other peculiarity about it.

When he put the lid upon the basket, it contained nothing but the empty skin. The wonderful sheet was spread over the basket containing the dry skin. After the performance of some mystic manoeuvres in the air with a little wooden doll. the sheet was withdrawn, the lid removed, and out of the basket arose a huge hissing cobra, his hood spread in anger, and his forked tongue darting in and out of his mouth.

Some native servants who were looking on fled; but the juggler quickly took out an Indian musical instrument, and began to play. A change came over the cobra; his anger died away: he stood up with half of his body in a perpendicular attitude, and began to sway to and fro in a sort of serpent dance to the music. In a word, he was charmed.

One juggler told a native servant, whom he did not know, to stretch out his arm palm upwards. Into the outstretched palm he placed a silver two-anna piece, and -holding out his own bony hand to show us that it was empty-he lifted the coin from the servant's hand, shut his own fist, reopened it in the twinkling of an eye, and an enormous black scorpion dropped into the servant's palm, who fled, shrieking with terror.

"God of our fathers, known of old;

Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine;
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget-lest we forget!

"The tumult and the shouting dies;

The captains and the kings depart;
Still stands Thine ancient Sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.

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