Please read out loud as if you were dictating to Dragon Dictate: clearly but at normal speed. This will give the software a chance to get used to your voice.<DIVIDE>
Mark Twain: speech about stage fright<DIVIDE>
My heart goes out in sympathy to anyone who is making his first appearance before an audience of human beings.<DIVIDE>
By a direct process of memory I go back 40 years, less 1 month–for I am older than I look.<DIVIDE>
I recall the occasion of my first appearance.<DIVIDE>
San Francisco knew me then only as a reporter, and I was to make my bow to San Francisco as a lecturer.<DIVIDE>
I knew that nothing short of compulsion would get me to the theater. So I bound myself by a hard and fast contract so that I could not escape.<DIVIDE>
I got to the theater 45 minutes before the hour set for the lecture.<DIVIDE>
My knees were shaking so that I didn't know whether I could stand up.<DIVIDE>
If there is an awful, horrible malady in the world, it is stage fright and seasickness. They are a pair.<DIVIDE>
I had stage fright then for the first and last time.<DIVIDE>
I was only seasick once, too. It was on a little ship on which there were 200 other passengers. I was sick.<DIVIDE>
I was so sick that there wasn't any left for those other 200 passengers.<DIVIDE>
It was dark and lonely behind the scenes in that theater, and I peeked through the little peek holes they have in theater curtains and looked into the big auditorium.<DIVIDE>
That was dark and empty, too. By and by it lighted up, and the audience began to arrive.<DIVIDE>
I had got a number of friends of mine, stalwart men, to sprinkle themselves through the audience armed with big clubs.<DIVIDE>
Every time I said anything they could possibly guess I intended to be funny, they were to pound those clubs on the floor.<DIVIDE>
Then there was a kind lady in a box up there, also a good friend of mine, the wife of the governor.<DIVIDE>
She was to watch me intently, and whenever I glanced toward her she was going to deliver a gubernatorial laugh that would lead the whole audience into applause.<DIVIDE>
At last I began. I had the manuscript tucked under a United States flag in front of me where I could get at it in case of need.<DIVIDE>
But I managed to get started without it. I walked up and down and talked and talked.<DIVIDE>
Right in the middle of the speech I had placed a gem. I had put in a moving, pathetic part which was to get at the hearts and souls of my hearers.<DIVIDE>
When I delivered it, they did just what I hoped and expected. They sat silent and awed. I had touched them.<DIVIDE>
Then I happened to glance up at the box where the governor's wife was–you know what happened.<DIVIDE>
Well, after the first agonizing 5 minutes, my stage fright left me, never to return.<DIVIDE>
I know if I was going to be hanged I could get up and make a good showing, and I intend to.<DIVIDE>
But I shall never forget my feelings before the agony left me, and I got up here to thank you for her for helping my daughter, by your kindness, to live through her first appearance.<DIVIDE>
And I want to thank you for your appreciation of her singing, which is, by the way, hereditary.