oach
in the long shadows. It was a sign that out of the worst comes the best.
But it was a terror to the unprepared; and Pastor Storrs preached about
it the following Sunday.

The missionary spirit of Longmeadow stirred among the Williamses, and
many of them brought what they called their mites to Pastor Storrs for
my education. If I were made a king no revenue could be half so sweet as
that. The village was richer than many a stonier New England place, but
men were struggling then all over the wide states and territories for
material existence.

The pension no longer came from Europe. It ceased when I returned from
France. Its former payment was considered apocryphal by Longmeadow,
whose very maids--too white, with a pink spot in each cheek--smiled with
reserved amusement at a student who thought it possible he could ever be
a king. I spoke to nobody but Pastor Storrs about my own convictions.
But local newspapers, with their omniscient grip on what is in the air,
bandied the subject back and forth.

We sometimes walked in the burying ground among dead Williamses, while
he argued down my claims, leaving them without a leg to stand on.
Reversing the usual ministerial formula, "If what has been said is true,
then it follows, first, secondly," and so on, he used to say:

"Eleazar, you were brought up among the Indians, conscious only of
bodily existence, and unconscious of your origin; granted. Money was
sent--let us say from Europe--for your support; granted. Several
persons, among them one who testified strongly against his will, told
you that you resembled the Bourbons; granted. You bear on your person
marks like those which were inflicted on the unfortunate dauphin of
France; granted. You were malignantly pursued while abroad; granted. But
what does it all prove? Nothing. It amounts simply to this: you know
nothing about your early years; some foreign person--perhaps an English
Williams--kindly interested himself in your upbringing; you were
probably scalded in the camps; you have some accidental traits of the
Bourbons; a man who heard you had a larger pension than the idiot he was
tending, disliked you. You can prove nothing more."

I never attempted to prove anything more to Pastor Storrs. It would have
been most ungrateful to persuade him I was an alien. At the same time he
prophesied his hopes of me, and many a judicious person blamed him for
treating me as something out of the ordinary, and cockering up prid