o more;
And my wrecked and scattered galleys
Strew dark Actium's fatal shore.

My tongue seemed frozen, or some kind of a ratchet at the base of it
had got out of order. For a moment--a moment can be the little sister
of eternity--I could say nothing. Then I found myself in the clutches of
the instinct for self-preservation. I felt it in me to stop the giggles
of the girls on the front seat; to take the patronising smiles out of
the tolerant eyes of the grown people. Maybe my voice lost something of
its piping insistence and was touched with genuine feeling; perhaps some
faint, faint spark of the divine fire which I longed to fan into a flame
did flicker in me for that one time. I had the indescribable happiness
of seeing the smiles die on the faces of my elders, and of hearing the
giggles of my friends cease.

I went to my seat amid what I was pleased to consider "thunders of
applause," and by way of acknowledgment, I spoke, with chastened
propriety, Whittier's ode to the pumpkin.

I cannot remember whether or not I was scolded. I'm afraid, afterward,
some people still laughed. As for me, oddly enough, my oratorical
aspirations died. I decided there were other careers better fitted to
one of my physique. So I had to go to the trouble of finding another
career; but just what it was I have forgotten.

V. REMORSE

IT is extraordinary, when you come to think of it, how very few days,
out of all the thousands that have passed, lift their heads from
the grey plain of the forgotten--like bowlders in a level stretch of
country. It is not alone the unimportant ones that are forgotten; but,
according to one's elders, many important ones have left no mark in the
memory. It seems to me, as I think it over, that it was the days that
affected the emotions that dwell with me, and I suppose all of us must
be the same in this respect.

Among those which I am never to forget is the day when Aunt Cordelia
came to visit us--my mother's aunt, she was--and when I discovered evil,
and tried to understand what the use of it was.

Great-aunt Cordelia was, as I often and often had been told, not only
much travelled, rich and handsome, but good also. She was, indeed, an
important personage in her own city, and it seemed to be regarded as
an evidence of unusual family fealty that she should go about, now and
then, briefly visiting all of her kinfolk to see how they fared in the
world. I ought to have looked forward to