AS I remember the boys and girls who grew up with me, I think of them as artists, or actors, or travellers, or rich merchants. Each of us, by the time we were half through grammar school, had selected a career. So far as I recollect, this career had very lit-tle to do with our abilities. We merely chose something that suited us. Our energy and our vanity crystallised into particular shapes. There was a sort of religion abroad in the West at that time that a person could do almost anything he set out to do. The older people, as well as the children, had an idea that the world was theirs -- they all were Monte Cristos in that respect.
As for me, I had decided to be an orator.
At the time of ****** this decision, I was nine years of age, decidedly thin and long drawn out, with two brown braids down my back, and a terrific shyness which I occasionally overcame with such a magnificent splurge that those who were not acquainted with my peculiarities probably thought me a shamefully assertive child.
I based my oratorical aspirations upon my having taken the prize a num-ber of times in Sunday-school for learn-ing the most New Testament verses, and upon the fact that I always could make myself heard to the farthest cor-ner of the room. I also felt that I had a great message to deliver to the world when I got around it, though in this, I was in no way different from several of my friends. I had noticed a number of things in the world that were not quite right, and which I thought needed attention, and I believed that if I were quite good and studied elocution, in a little while I should be able to set my part of the world right, and perhaps even extend my influence to adjoining districts.
Meantime I practised terrible vocal exercises, chiefly consisting of a rau-cous "caw" something like a crow's favourite remark, and advocated by my teacher in elocution for no reason that I can now remember; and I stood be-fore the glass for hours at a time mak-ing grimaces so as to acquire the "ac-tor's face," till my frightened little sis-ters implored me to turn back into my-self again.
It was a great day for me when I was asked to participate in the Harvest Home Festival at our church on Thanksgiving Day. I looked upon it as the beginning of my career, and bought crimping papers so that my hair could be properly fluted. Of course, I wanted a new dress for the occasion, and I spent several days in planning the kind of a one I thought best suited to such a memorable event. I even picked out the particular lace pattern I wanted for the ruffles. This was before I submitted the proposition to Mother, however. When I told her about it she said she could see no use in getting a new dress and going to all the trouble of ****** it when my white one with the green harps was perfectly good.
This was such an unusual dress and had gone through so many vicissitudes, that I really was devotedly attached to it. It had, in the beginning, belonged to my Aunt Bess, and in the days of its first glory had been a sheer Irish linen lawn, with tiny green harps on it at agreeable intervals. But in the course of time, it had to be sent to the wash-tub, and then, behold, all the lit-tle lovely harps followed the example of the harp that "once through Tara's hall the soul of music shed," and dis-appeared! Only vague, dirty, yellow reminders of their beauty remained, not to decorate, but to disfigure the fine fabric.
Aunt Bess, naturally enough, felt ir-ritated, and she gave the goods to mother, saying that she might be able to boil the yellow stains out of it and make me a dress. I had gone about many a time, like love amid the ruins, in the fragments of Aunt Bess's splen-dour, and I was not happy in the thought of dangling these dimmed re-minders of Ireland's past around with me. But mother said she thought I'd have a really truly white Sunday best dress out of it by the time she was through with it. So she prepared a strong solution of sodium and things, and boiled the breadths, and every little green harp came dancing back as if awaiting the hand of a new Dublin poet.
The green of them was even more charming than it had been at first, and I, as happy as if I had acquired the golden harp for which I then vaguely longed, went to Sunday-school all that summer in this miraculous dress of now-you-see-them-and-now-you-don't, and became so used to being asked if I were Irish that my heart exulted when I found that I might -- fractionally -- claim to be, and that one of the Fenian martyrs had been an ancestor. For a year, even, after that discovery of the Fenian martyr, ancestors were a fa-vorite study of mine.
Well, though the dress became some-thing more than familiar to the eyes of my associates, I was so attached to it that I felt no objection to wearing it on the great occasion; and, that be-ing settled, all that remained was to select the piece which was to reveal my talents to a hitherto unappreciative -- or, perhaps I should say, unsuspecting -- group of friends and relatives. It seemed to me that I knew better than my teacher (who had agreed to select the pieces for her pupils) possibly could what sort of a thing best repre-sented my talents, and so, after some thought, I selected "Antony and Cleo-patra," and as I lagged along the too-familiar road to school, avoiding the companionship of my acquaintances, I repeated:
I am dying, Egypt, dying!
Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast, And the dark Plutonian shadows Gather on the evening blast.
Sometimes I grew so impassioned, so heedless of all save my mimic sorrow and the swing of the purple lines, that I could not bring myself to modify my voice, and the passers-by heard my shrill tones vibrating with:
As for thee, star-eyed Egyptian!
Glorious sorceress of the Nile!
Light the path to Stygian horrors With the splendour of thy smile.
I wiped dishes to the rhythm of such phrases as "scarred and veteran le-gions," and laced my shoes to the music of "Though no glittering guards sur-round me."
