1.G 15. How to Get Information

How to Get Information.

There are two points about learning. In the first place, never ask a question, if you can help it; and secondly, never let a thing go unknown for the lack of asking a question, if you cannot help it.

Think it out first. Dig it out, study it, go around it, question yourself, and get it out. If you really cannot, then turn and ask somebody. See every thing, and see it right, and use it as you go along. A man’s study should be everywhere, in the house, in the street, in the fields, and in the busy haunts of men. You see a bevy of children in the window, and you can form them into a picture in your mind. You may see the nurse, and the way she is dressed. You try to describe it. You look again, and make yourself master of the details. Byand-by it will come up to you again itself, and you will be able to make an accurate picture of it, having made your observation accurate. Little by little, this habit will grow, until by-and-by, in later life, you will find that you command respect by your illustrations just as much as by arguments and analogies.

ILLUSTRATIONS MUST BE PROMPT.

Then, again, while elaborate allegories and fables are very good things, and may be used with discretion, illustrations, so called, ought always to be clean, accurate, and quick. Do not let them dawdle on your hands. There is nothing that tires an audience so much as when they have to think faster than you do. You have got to keep ahead of them. Do you know what it is to walk behind slow people and tread on their heels? How it tires and vexes one! You know how people are vexed with a preacher who is slow and dilatory, and does not get along. He tires people out, for though he may have only six or seven words of his sentence completed, they know the whole of it; and what is the use, then, of his uttering the rest? With illustrations, there should be energy and vigour in their delivery. Let them come with a crack, as when a driver would stir up his team. The horse does not know anything about it until the crack of the whip comes. So with an illustration. Make it sharp. Throw it out. Let it come better and better, and the best at the last, and then be done with it.