He sat a trifle straighter on his bench,
and began gathering the points of his well-conned speech. He saw old
Barnaby moving around the rim of the crowd, apparently looking for a seat.
Meantime, Tom was proceeding in a clear, soft, far-reaching voice. The
Colonel started and looked askance. What did it mean? At first his brain
was confused, but presently he understood. Word for word, sentence for
sentence, paragraph for paragraph, Tom was delivering the Colonel's own
sonorous speech! Of course the application was reversed here and there, so
that the wit, the humor, and the personal thrusts all went home. It was a
wonderful piece of _ad captandum_ oratory. The crowd went wild from start
to finish.
Colonel Mobley Sommerton sat dazed and stupefied, mopping his forehead and
trying to collect his faculties. He felt beaten, annihilated, while Tom
soared superbly on the wings of Sommertonian oratory so mysteriously at his
command.
From a most eligible point of view Phyllis was gazing at Tom and receiving
the full brilliant current of his speech, and she appeared to catch a fine
stimulus from the flow of its opening sentences.
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