mpliment of
acting on it promptly, for the next morning I entered the Big Rapids
High School, which was also a preparatory school for college. There I
would study, I determined, as long as my money held out, and with the
optimism of youth I succeeded in confining my imagination to this side
of that crisis. My home, thanks to Mary, was assured; the wardrobe I had
brought from the woods covered me sufficiently; to one who had
walked five and six miles a day for years, walking to school held no
discomfort; and as for pleasure, I found it, like a heroine of fiction,
in my studies. For the first time life was smiling at me, and with all
my young heart I smiled back.

The preceptress of the high school was Lucy Foot, a college graduate and
a remarkable woman. I had heard much of her sympathy and understanding;
and on the evening following my first day in school I went to her
and repeated the confidences I had reposed in the Reverend Marianna
Thompson. My trust in her was justified. She took an immediate interest
in me, and proved it at once by putting me into the speaking and
debating classes, where I was given every opportunity to hold forth to
helpless classmates when the spirit of eloquence moved me.

As an aid to public speaking I was taught to "elocute," and I remember
in every mournful detail the occasion on which I gave my first
recitation. We were having our monthly "public exhibition night," and
the audience included not only my classmates, but their parents and
friends as well. The selection I intended to recite was a poem entitled
"No Sects in Heaven," but when I faced my audience I was so appalled by
its size and by the sudden realization of my own temerity that I fainted
during the delivery of the first verse. Sympathetic classmates carried
me into an anteroom and revived me, after which they naturally assumed
that the entertainment I furnished was over for the evening. I, however,
felt that if I let that failure stand against me I could never afterward
speak in public; and within ten minutes, notwithstanding the protests of
my friends, I was back in the hall and beginning my recitation a second
time. The audience gave me its eager attention. Possibly it hoped to see
me topple off the platform again, but nothing of the sort occurred.
I went through the recitation with self-possession and received some
friendly applause at the end. Strangely enough, those first sensations
of "stage fright" have been experienced,