When you talk, try to make all the words clear and distinct; open your mouth and let the sound out. Once I had a big grown boy in one of my classes who did not open his lips properly when he spoke. So I asked him to prop his mouth open with a piece of stick and then talk. I made him do it until he learned to speak much more clearly. A famous Greek orator, named Demosthenes, who had a habit of mumbling his words, trained himself to speak clearly by putting pebbles in his mouth and then reciting in a loud voice. When you want your voices to sound pleasant,--and that is always, of course,--you must call on your brain to help. That is your thinking machine. Always think twice before you let anything unpleasant or unkind come out of your voice box. How happy we could make everyone about us if we followed this rule! VIII. THINKING AND ANSWERING Suppose, as you are walking home from school to-day, you are about to cross the street when you see an automobile coming very fast. What do you do? You stop, of course; wait for it to go by, and then start on again. Why do you stop? "Why," you say, "if I didn't, the automobile might run over me." Something of that sort would just flash through your mind, wouldn't it, in the very same second that you first saw the automobile coming. Now, as you know, you think with your brain. But what was it this time that set your brain to thinking? "Nothing," you say, "I just saw the automobile coming." And that is true in a way: you didn't need anything more than your eyes to tell you. But how did your eyes get the message to your brain, and how did your brain tell your legs to stop walking? We must have in our bodies a kind of telephone system. And that is, in fact, just what we have. Our _brain_ is our "central office"; and our _nerves_ are the wires, running from all parts of our body to the brain, carrying messages back and forth. An old man and an old woman lived out on the very edge of a little town. One day their house caught fire and was blazing away before they noticed it. They rushed to their neighbor's telephone and rang up "Central" to tell her to "phone" for the firemen and hose cart. _Kling a-ling-a-ling!_ went their bell, but no "Central" answered; and while a man was running to town to get the firemen, the fire got such a good start that the house burned down. You can see from this why we need a central office in good working order, when we use the "phone." All the wires run into the one building, and there must be some one there to receive calls and see that they are sent out to their proper places. In this case, you see, "Central" should have been at her post to see that the message went on to the engine house, and then the fire would have been put out "double-quick."