stimulate my sense of recitation and rhetoric. Why, in Bryan's second
campaign,' says Andy, 'they used to give me three gin rickeys and
I'd speak two hours longer than Billy himself could on the silver
question. Finally, they persuaded me to take the gold cure.'

"'If you've got to get rid of your excess verbiage,' says I, 'why
not go out on the river bank and speak a piece? It seems to me
there was an old spell-binder named Cantharides that used to go and
disincorporate himself of his windy numbers along the seashore.'

"'No,' says Andy, 'I must have an audience. I feel like if I once
turned loose people would begin to call Senator Beveridge the Grand
Young Sphinx of the Wabash. I've got to get an audience together,
Jeff, and get this oral distension assuaged or it may turn in on me
and I'd go about feeling like a deckle-edge edition de luxe of Mrs. E.
D. E. N. Southworth.'

"'On what special subject of the theorems and topics does your desire
for vocality seem to be connected with?' I asks.

"'I ain't particular,' says Andy. 'I am equally good and varicose on
all subjects. I can take up the matter of Russian immigration, or
the poetry of John W. Keats, or the tariff, or Kabyle literature,
or drainage, and make my audience weep, cry, sob and shed tears by
turns.'

"'Well, Andy,' says I, 'if you are bound to get rid of this
accumulation of vernacular suppose you go out in town and work it
on some indulgent citizen. Me and the boys will take care of the
business. Everybody will be through dinner pretty soon, and salt pork