to impress on me the importance of using resounding sentences which he
said would keep reverberating in the caverns of the mind. For this
effect he had a theory that words ending in "ation" and "ention" were
especially fitted. Trumpet-words, he called them, brazen notes which
penetrated the deepest crevices of the brain. I must admit that in the
practice of his theory he was wonderfully successful, for after thirty
years I can still hear his sonorous voice filling the church with the
announcement that the "Jewish congregation was a segregation for the
preservation of the Jewish nation." I can see him pausing in his
discourse to lubricate his vocal chords with a glass of ice-water, and
then drawing himself to his full height, fix his eyes on his hushed
people and cry: "What did I say the Jewish congregation was? Let me
refresh your recollection." His answer must ring to-day in the caverns
of many minds. Others of his phrases, I know, still echo in my own.
But this is because so often in my own room I practised declaiming
them, striving to enunciate them with my mentor's finish.

Was it a wonder that I became a little Mr. Pound? I suppose, too, that
I became a veritable little cad. Conscious of my advantages in birth
and breeding, much impressed on me by my mother, I had never been
intimate with the village boys. Now I shunned them altogether. To me
they were thoughtless heathen and unprofitable company. I strove for a
time to correct their evil ways and to bring them to repentance. That
was something which I could properly do without unnecessary
association. I had for my reward only taunts. They called me "Goody"
and "Miss Malcolm," and like names contemplated to shame me from the
course which I had chosen, but in the martyrdom which they made me
suffer I only gloried, and I could have let them stone me to death and
forgiven them, provided, of course, that Mr. Pound preached about me
afterward and that my name were enrolled in the company of well-known
martyrs. Looking back, I realize that I was playing. There was a fine
excitement in being hunted in my comings and goings through the
village. It became my Africa, where any tree might hide a deadly
enemy, and any fence an ambush. I discovered secret passages through
backyards. I matched cunning against overwhelming force, and
sometimes, when the odds were not too great against me, I remembered
Joshua and another David and turned on the Philistines and