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."