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Senator Frye told me that he prevailed upon Senator Hanna to make short campaign speeches first. He requested him to try a fifteen-minute speech, then extend them to thirty minutes. Before their tour was ended, he was making just as long and just as good a speech as any old experienced campaigner.

And that bird there, the great, grand, haughty, unbending Aquila chrysoetus, that golden eagle, sat. I say, he sat. And there, so far as he was concerned, appeared to be an end of it. He might have been a carven copestone of the very granite fang he sat upon, for all the appearance of life he gave, except that occasionally say at fifteen-minute intervals he winked a yellow-lidded wink.

"Thish-yer Smiley had a mare the boys called her the fifteen-minute nag, but that was only in fun, you know, because of course she was faster than that and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something of that kind.

The former had had time to think over the situation, and in Chicago, while waiting for the Pacific express to start, he had had a fifteen-minute talk with a relative, a Western business man, to whom mining and undermining were matters well understood, and what this expert said had filled him with dismay. "You've simply been bled until you could bleed no more," said he.

That fifteen-minute walk to the Serghievskaia, with the lynx-eyed guardian tramping at his heels, wrought new havoc with Ivan. It took sixty seconds to perceive that the closely cherished ideal of his boyhood had been worthy of every moment of adulation expended on it. Two minutes more, and the intensity of past emotions was quite swallowed up in the joy of the present.

There was thirty minutes of individual instruction, twenty minutes of signal work, and finally two fifteen-minute scrimmage periods with the second team. And what the 'varsity did to the second that day was a pity! With seven coaches urging them on, the 'varsity players performed desperately. The new plays to be used against Claflin were tried out and worked well.

To put it another way, speeches on public subjects of great importance are apt to be at least an hour long, and not infrequently more, and in an hour one easily speaks six or seven thousand words, so that fifteen hundred words would not fill a fifteen-minute speech.

In that fifteen-minute walk there passed through my mind and heart all the elements of hell. It was a new experience to me I had not travelled that way before. I went into a little restaurant to use the 'phone. I laid the nickel on the counter, when I had finished, and as I did so the waiter said, "It's a 'phone on me, Mr. Irvine;" and he rang up five cents in the cash register.

In one large laundry I worked over ten hours for seven days in the week more than seventy-two hours. About nine and a half hours seemed to be the usual day. Four hotels gave fifteen-minute rest pauses for tea, morning and afternoon; two gave them once a day. These rests are of incalculable relief.

I agreed readily enough, for, unfortunately, my professional duties were not onerous. "Good man!" he cried, wringing my hand in his impetuous way. "We start now." "What, to-night?" "To-night! I had thought of turning in, I must admit. I have not dared to sleep for forty-eight hours, except in fifteen-minute stretches. But there is one move that must be made to-night and immediately.