"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 folks--shiny-headed--slant up best ear toward 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. "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." "Pretty nigh killed himself," says the good landlady, "goin' about lecterin' two or three winters, talking in cold country lyceums--as he used to say--goin' home to cold parlors and bein' treated to cold apples and cold water, and then goin' up into a cold bed in a cold chamber, and comin' home next mornin' with a cold in his head as bad as the horse distemper. Then he'd look kind of sorry for havin' said it, and tell how kind some of the good women was to him; how one spread an eiderdown comforter for him, and another fixed up somethin' hot for him after the lectur, and another one said, 'There now, you smoke that cigar of yours after the lectur, jest as if you was at home,' and if they'd all been like that, he'd have gone on lecturing forever, but, as it was, he had got pooty nigh enough of it, and preferred a nateral death to puttin' himself out of the world by such violent means as lecturin'." To these graphic pictures of the "lyceum lecturer" we would add one more which was given by Mr. J.W. Harper, at the Holmes Breakfast.