That Twain practiced his speech patterns is indisputable. That he mastered
the dramatic pause, he says so himself. I teach media and presentation
techniques to business execs and urge them to use the Twainian pause to
command attention. As he said in a letter to Livy before they were married,
"No man knows better than I, the enormous value of the whole-hearted welcome
achieved without a spoken word - and no man will dare more than I to get it.
An audience captured in that way belongs to the speaker, body and soul, for
the rest of the evening." (I do not have the citation handy.) He would walk
from the dark at the back of the stage to the front and simply look at his
audience for as long as two minutes, while lighting his cigar or toying with
note cards in his pocket. Holbrook does this and to great affect.

JERRY VORPAHL
Sacramento,
The town MT called, "A City of Saloons."