features, rose from behind the pulpit in the
Congregational Church, and read from a manuscript--read quietly,
colloquially, like a teacher addressing a group of students, with
scarcely a gesture and without raising his voice. Only once toward the
end of the hour did he thrill us, and then only for a moment.

Father was a little saddened. He shook his head gravely. "He isn't the
orator he was in the good old anti-slavery days," he explained and
passed again into a glowing account of the famous "slave speech" in
Faneuil Hall when the pro-slavery men all but mobbed the speaker.

Per contra, I liked, (and the boys all liked) a certain peripatetic
temperance lecturer named Beale, for _he_ was an orator, one of those
who rise on an impassioned chant, soaring above the snows of Chimborazo,
mingling the purple and gold of sunset with the saffron and silver of
the dawn. None of us could tell just what these gorgeous passages meant,
but they were beautiful while they lasted, and sadly corrupted our
oratorical style. It took some of us twenty years to recover from the
fascination of this man's absurd and high falutin' elocutionary
sing-song.

I forgot the farm, I forgot the valley of my birth, I lived wholly and
with joy in the present. Song, poetry, history mingled with the sports
which made our life so unceasingly interesting. There was a certain
girl, the daughter of the shoe merchant, who (temporarily) displaced the
image of Agnes in the niche of my shrine, and to roll the platter for
her at a "sociable" was a very high honor indeed, and there was another,
a glorious contralto singer, much older than I--but there--I must not
claim to have even attracted her eyes, and my meetings with Millie were
so few and so public that I cannot claim to have ever conversed with
her. They were all boyish adorations.

Much as I enjoyed this winter, greatly as it instructed me, I cannot now
recover from its luminous dark more than here and there an incident, a
poem, a song. It was all delightful, that I know, so filled with joyous
hours that I retain but a mingled impression of satisfaction and
regret--satisfaction with life as I found it, regret at its inevitable
ending--for my father, irritated by the failure of his renter, announced
that he had decided to put us all back upon the farm.

CHAPTER XVIII

Back to the Farm

Judging from the entries in a small diary of this date, I was neither an
introspective youth nor one given