ped badly, and the other had the
voice of a penny trumpet. Week after week these boys went through the
quarrel of Brutus and Cassius, for the benefit of myself and others, to
see if their example would not provoke us to a generous competition for
all the honors.

How it operated on the other boys in after life I can not say; but the
effect on me was decidedly unwholesome--discouraging, indeed,--until I was
old enough to judge for myself, and to carry into operation a system of my
own.

On coming to the passage,--

"Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts;
Dash him to pieces!"--

the elder of the boys gave it after the following fashion: "Be ready,
godths, with all your thunderbolths,--dath him in pietheth!"--bringing
his right fist down into his left palm with all his strength, and his
lifted foot upon the platform, which was built like a sounding-board, so
that the master himself, who had suggested the action and obliged the poor
boy to rehearse it over and over again, appeared to be utterly carried
away by the magnificent demonstration; while to me--so deficient was I in
rhetorical taste--it sounded like a crash of broken crockery, intermingled
with chicken peeps.

I never got over it; and to this day can not endure stamping, nor even
tapping of the foot, nor clapping the hands together, nor thumping the
table for illustration; having an idea that such noises are not oratory,
and that untranslatable sounds are not language.

My next essay was of a somewhat different kind. I took the field in
person, being in my nineteenth year, well proportioned, and already
beginning to have a sincere relish for poetry, if not for declamation. I
had always been a great reader; and in the course of my foraging
depredations I had met with "The Mariner's Dream" and "The Lake of the
Dismal Swamp," both of which I had committed to memory before I knew it.

And one day, happening to be alone with my sister, and newly rigged out in
a student's gown, such as the lads at Brunswick sported when they came to
show off among their old companions, I proposed to astonish her by
rehearsing these two poems in appropriate costume. Being very proud of her
brother, and very obliging, she consented at once,--upon condition that
our dear mother, who had never seen anything of the sort, should be
invited to make one of the audience.

On the whole, I rather think that I succeeded in astonishing both. I well
remember their looks of amazemen