filled with a savage
resentment of my poverty and my threadbare clothing.

Before the week was over, Professor Brown asked me to assist in reading
the proof-sheets of his new book and this I did, going over it with him
line by line. His deference to my judgment was a sincere compliment to
my reading and warmed my heart like some elixir. It was my first
authoritative appreciation and when at the end of the third session he
said, "I shall consider your criticism more than equal to the sum of
your tuition," I began to faintly forecast the time when my brain would
make me self-supporting.

My days were now cheerful. My life had direction. For two hours each
afternoon (when work in the school was over) I sat with Brown discussing
the laws of dramatic art, and to make myself still more valuable in this
work, I read every listed book or article upon expression, and
translated several French authorities, transcribing them in longhand for
his use.

In this work the weeks went by and spring approached. In a certain sense
I felt that I was gaining an education which would be of value to me but
I was not earning one cent of money, and my out-go was more than five
dollars per week, for I occasionally went to the theater, and I had
also begun attendance at the Boston Symphony concerts in Music Hall.

By paying twenty-five cents students were allowed to fill the gallery
and to stand on the ground floor, and Friday afternoons generally found
me leaning against the wall listening to Brahms and Wagner. At such
times I often thought of my mother, and my uncle David and wished that
they too might hear these wondrous harmonies. I tried to imagine what
the effect of this tumult of sound would be, as it beat in upon their
inherited deeply musical brain-cells!

One by one I caught up the threads of certain other peculiar Boston
interests, and by careful reading of the _Transcript_ was enabled to
vibrate in full harmony with the local hymn of gratitude. New York
became a mere emporium, a town without a library, a city without a first
class orchestra, the home of a few commercial painters and several
journalistic poets! Chicago was a huge dirty town on the middle border.
Washington a vulgar political camp--only Philadelphia was admitted to
have the quality of a real city and her literary and artistic resources
were pitiably slender and failing!

But all the time that I was feasting on these insubstantial glories, my
meat was being cut dow