How Mark Twain Learned to Speak Without Notes

Mark Twain’s history of how he speak without notes:

…Thirty years ago I was delivering a memorized lecture every night, and every night I had to help myself with a page of notes to keep from getting myself mixed. The notes consisted of beginnings of sentences, and were eleven in number, and they ran something like this: In that region the weatherAt that time it was a customBut in California one never heard Eleven of them. They initialed the brief of the lecture and protected me against skipping. But they all looked about alike on the page; they formed no picture; I had them by heart, but I could never with certainty remember the order of their succession; therefore, I always had to keep those notes by me and look at them every little while…

…How did I remember the order of the pictures? By one, two. three, andfour? No, that would have been too difficult 1 turned these numbers into pictures. andcombined the pictures of the numbers with the pictures of the points. To illustrate. Number one sounds like run. so 1 made a race horse stand for one. 1 pictured Roosevelt in his room, reading astride a race horse. Fortwo, 1 chose a word thatsounds like two-zoo. 1 had the cherry tree that Thomas Edison was looking at standing in the bear cage at the zoo. For three. 1 pictured an object that sounds like three-tree. I. had Lincoln sprawled outin the top of a tree, reading aloud to his partner. For four 1 imagined a picture that sounds like four — door. Mark Twain stood in an open door, leaning dgainst the jamb, licking the ink off his fingers as he talked to the audience…