t in point of size, commodious, and favorably known. At this time I
was in excellent health and weighed one hundred and forty-three pounds.
But from the moment of the public announcement of my lecture, my appetite
for food, for meat particularly, began to fail me. "How peevish and
irritable he is growing!" I heard one member of the family remark to
another. Soon the grocer's scales indicated that my weight was
diminishing. It fell to one hundred and forty-one,--then to one hundred
and forty,--then to one hundred and thirty-eight,--and finally, when the
30th of May arrived, I found I weighed only one hundred and thirty-four
pounds!

The crisis was now at hand. Do not laugh at me, ye self-assured ones, with
your comfortable sense of your own powers,--ye who care as little for an
audience as for a field of cabbages,--do not jeer at one who has felt the
pangs of shyness and quailed under the imaginary terrors of a first public
appearance. For you it may be a small matter to face an audience,--that
nearest approximation to the many-headed monster which we can palpably
encounter; but for one whose diffidence had become the standard of that
quality to his acquaintances the venture was perilous and desperate, as
the sequel showed.

Never had time rolled by with such fearful velocity as on that eventful
day. Breakfast was hardly over before preparations were being made for
dinner. Small appetite had I for either. Before I had finished pacing the
parlor there was a summons to tea. It was like the summons to the
criminal: "Rise up, Master Barnardine, and be hanged." With a most shallow
affectation of _nonchalance_ I sat down at the table. A child might have
detected my agitation; and yet, with horrible insincerity, I alluded to
the news of the day, and asked the family why they were all so silent.
They saw from my look that they might as well have joked with a man on his
way to execution.

Having dressed and adorned myself for the sacrifice, I returned to the
parlor, when the rumbling of coach-wheels, the sudden letting down of
steps, and then a frightfully discordant ring of the doorbell, sent the
blood from my cheeks and made my heart palpitate like a trip-hammer. "Is
th-th-that the off-officer,--I mean the coachman?" I stammered. Yes, there
was no doubt about it.

Straightening my person, I affected a dignified calmness, and assured my
dear, anxious mother that I was not in the least nervous,--oh, not in the
least!

It wa