Then I did another fine thing, I sat down. I wish now I had done that earlier. I wish now I had sat down before I got up. I was the last man out of the church--and I hurried. But they beat me out--all nine of them. When I went out the door, the old sexton said as he jiggled the key in the door to hurry me, "Don't feel bad, bub, I've heerd worse than that. You're all right, bub, but you don't know nothin' yet." I cried all the way to town. If he had plunged a dagger into me he would not have hurt me so much. It has taken some years to learn that the old man was right. I had wonderful truth in that sermon. No sermon ever had greater truth, but I had not lived it. The old man meant I did not know my own sermon. So, children, when you prepare your commencement oration, write about what you know best, what you have lived. If you know more about peeling potatoes than about anything else, write about "Peeling Potatoes," and you are most likely to hear the applause peal from that part of your audience unrelated to you. Out of every thousand books published, perhaps nine hundred of them do not sell enough to pay the cost of printing them. As you study the books that do live, you note that they are the books that have been lived. Perhaps the books that fail have just as much of truth in them and they may even be better written, yet they lack the vital impulse. They come out of the author's head. The books that live must come out of his heart. They are his own life. They come surging and pulsating from the book of his experience. The best part of our schooling comes not from the books, but from the men behind the books. We study agriculture from books. That does not make us an agriculturist. We must take a hoe and go out and agricult. That is the knowing in the doing. You Must Live Your Song "There was never a picture painted, There was never a poem sung, But the soul of the artist fainted, And the poet's heart was wrung." So many young people think because they have a good voice and they have cultivated it, they are singers. All this cultivation and irritation and irrigation and gargling of the throat are merely symptoms of a singer--merely neckties. Singers look better with neckties. They think the song comes from the diaphragm. But it comes from the heart, chaperoned by the diaphragm. You cannot sing a song you have not lived. Jessie was singing the other day at a chautauqua. She has a beautiful voice, and she has been away to "Ber-leen" to have it attended to. She sang that afternoon in the tent, "The Last Rose of Summer." She sang it with every note so well placed, with the sweetest little trills and tendrils, with the smile exactly like her teacher had taught her. Jessie exhibited all the machinery and trimmings for the song, but she had no steam, no song. She sang the notes. She might as well have sung, "Pop, Goes the Weasel."