"In my readings I had an opportunity to study and find out for myself what the public wants, and afterward I would endeavor to use the knowledge gained in my writing. The public desires nothing but what is absolutely natural, and so perfectly natural as to be fairly artless. It can not tolerate affectation, and it takes little interest in the classical production. It demands simple sentiments that come direct from the heart. While on the lecture platform I watched the effect that my readings had on the audience very closely and whenever anybody left the hall I knew that my recitation was at fault and tried to find out why. Once a man and his wife made an exit while I was giving The Happy Little Cripple--a recitation I had prepared with particular enthusiasm and satisfaction. It fulfilled, as few poems do, all the requirements of length, climax and those many necessary features for a recitation. The subject was a theme of real pathos, beautified by the cheer and optimism of the little sufferer. Consequently when this couple left the hall I was very anxious to know the reason and asked a friend to find out. He learned that they had a little hunch-back child of their own. After this experience I never used that recitation again. On the other hand, it often required a long time for me to realize that the public would enjoy a poem which, because of some blind impulse, I thought unsuitable. Once a man said to me, 'Why don't you recite When the Frost Is on the Punkin?' The use of it had never occurred to me for I thought it 'wouldn't go.' He persuaded me to try it and it became one of my most favored recitations. Thus, I learned to judge and value my verses by their effect upon the public. Occasionally, at first, I had presumed to write 'over the heads' of the audience, consoling myself for the cool reception by thinking my auditors were not of sufficient intellectual height to appreciate my efforts. But after a time it came home to me that I myself was at fault in these failures, and then I disliked anything that did not appeal to the public and learned to discriminate between that which did not ring true to my hearers and that which won them by virtue of its truthfulness and was simply heart high." As a reader of his own poems, as a teller of humorous stories, as a mimic, indeed as a finished actor, Riley's genius was rare and beyond question. In a lecture on the Humorous Story, Mark Twain, referring to the story of the One Legged Soldier and the different ways of telling it, once said: "It takes only a minute and a half to tell it in its comic form; and it isn't worth telling after all. Put into the humorous-story form, it takes ten minutes, and is about the funniest thing I have ever listened to--as James Whitcomb Riley tells it.