s. I dreamed now of the power and
fame of a Washington, a Webster, a Grant--names which stood to me as
symbols of accomplishment. So what my parents at first brushed aside
as the idle dreaming of a boy they soon realized to be a vague but
persistent purpose which must be beaten down. They gave me a certain
dignity by descending to debate. What did I want to be? How could I
answer, who could not even name the vocations in which men won their
way to coveted heights? My mother gave me the key which opened the
world to me.

"William," she said, addressing my father, "I do believe Davy is
thinking of being a minister and is kind of ashamed to own it."

I caught the softening note in my mother's voice and in her eyes a
light of pride as she regarded me inquiringly. Whatever obligation lay
on me to till the ancestral acres, there was a higher duty which would
absolve it. This she had pointed out. My plans at once took a
concrete form, and though my first faltering assent might have savored
of hypocrisy, I was soon sincere in my determination. And now the
opposition crumbled and my parents found pride in a son whose heart at
the age of ten was stirred by the need of lost humanity. My father
discovered that it had been his own early ambition to be a minister; it
was as though I was to erect the edifice to which he had feared to put
his strength, and it comforted him. He delighted to lay his hand upon
my head in the presence of company and to announce that his David was
going to do the work to which he had always believed he had himself
been called. With my mother the son's gifts became a subject on which
she never tired dilating, and naturally such flattery reconciled me to
a calling far removed from all my old ambitions; but had it been
intimated to me that I might become a plumber I should have accepted
that vocation just as readily, provided that by following it I should
go out of the valley, over the mountains, to Pittsburgh and the
presence of Rufus Blight.

Now arose Mr. Pound to help me. Here was the crowning incongruity in a
chain of incongruous events. I had never liked Mr. Pound. He had
overwhelmed me too often. His sermon was the rack on which I was
stretched for an hour every Sunday to endure untold agonies of
restlessness; his house the temple to which too often I had to carry
propitiatory offerings of vegetables and chickens. And then his
persecution of my friend the Professor still rankled in