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Show HI As To Conversation B ' a ND now the eastern' papers are telling us, B some of them, that the art of conversation 1 Is going out of date. Some are trying to 1 tell how it can be cultivated. Kf It seems to us that conversation is mostly a HI habit and the habit is directed by the occupa-1 occupa-1 tion of the people. The conversation of a lot 1 of stock brokers is about stocks, the converts conver-ts sation of ladies just before easter is very liable 1 to be about Easter hats. The best school for j conversation is that which comes naturally in an H intellectual home, when the nights are long in M the winter and books are plenty and the whole m family, from the smallest child that can talk i up, is on some high or holy theme. B Burnes Cotter's Saturday Night described a M good place in which to cultivate conversation, M and really the rule ought to be that the heart and m the brain both should be interested and only the M best thoughts be given, and by the best we mean M i those that interest the brain and the heart most m at the same time. B The older children in a family grow thinking m their father probably Is the best conversationalist M in the world; the younger grow up believing M: their mother is, the fact being that the father B has become absorbed in business and the moth- fl er has become more and more absorbed in her fl children. M You go into a counting house in New York, M you moot distinguished men, men whose names M are authority on the street and the average H western man, when brought in direct tassocia- m tion with that class of men, are astonished to H .find how narrow they are and how provincial; M their "repertoire" extends only over two or three H subjects and their knowledge of the outside of M their own country is shamefully limited. M "When the man from Wyoming took the first M train that went through to the east and went to M Concord and called on the great Emerson and K said: "Mr. Emerson, T have no business, I mere- H ly called to pay my respects to you because I Mf have admired you and your writings so long," j and Emerson asked him where he was from and V he told him from Wyoming. Emerson showed M that even the limitations were attaching to him, j because he said: "Wyoming? I believe that is ' a place in Pennsylvania." K He had never heard of the real Wyoming of H, the west with the cowboy, the fighters, the riders i and the range. Conversation will advance or re- K cede just as the business of the people advance H or recedes. B Speaking of New York, another thing will fl strike the western man sooner than anything M else, and that Is that while the New Yorker that he talks to can tell him about half; the counties H in England and name the celebrated places in H France, he will be liable to look perfectly dazed H when a man speaks of "where rolls the Oregon," H or Yosemite or Yellowstone paint their everlast- Hf ing glorious pictures for human eyes to admire. H That is where tlie provincial part of eastern, H men comes in. He took up the impression while H a child that it would be a great thing to go H to Europe and he has been over two or three H4 times; he has passed through some places where H' people said there was magnificent scenery; he H' has seen some of the fine works of art, and it H has had the effect to close his mind to anything B west of New York, or at least, west of Niagara S. Falls. Hj There will be better talkers when men are Hi better posted and when their thoughts are drawn H into higher currents and they realize that there B is, after all, something for men to do except H' to make a scuffle of from ten to forty years to H get a little bigger fortune than the next nelgh- Hl bor. In other words, we are just as we are B. raised. When the Greeks were all good talkers, H was a time when the young men would listen to Hjj philosophy of Socrates or of Aristotle; they be- H lieved in certain fixed principles and they believed be-lieved in the immortal gods and their influence upon men. You take men nowadays that have no fixed principles and do not believe in an God, and they are generally shallow talkers. |