ed on
the shoulders of my comrades.

There seemed open to me the Church and the law. Had I lived in a
different environment, there would have been also the stage. But I saw
only two outlets for my talents, the Church, toward which my tastes
inclined, and the law, which had been my father's profession.

At last I chose the Church. I liked the thought of my scholarly
future--of the power which my voice might have to sway audiences and to
move them.

I am putting it all down, all of my boyish optimism, conceit--whatever
you may choose to call it.

Yet I am convinced of this, and my success of a few years proved it,
that had nothing interfered with my future, I should have made an
impression on ever-widening circles.

But something came to interfere.

In my last years at the Seminary, I boarded at a house where I met
daily the daughter of the landlady. She was a little thing, with
yellow hair and a childish manner. As I look back, I can't say that I
was ever greatly attracted to her. But she was a part of my life for
so long that gradually there grew up between us a sort of good
fellowship. Not friendship in the sense that I have understood it with
you; there was about it nothing of spiritual or of mental congeniality.
But I played the big brother. I took her to little dances; and to
other college affairs. I gave both to herself and to her widowed
mother such little pleasures as it is possible for a man to give to two
rather lonely women. There were other students in the house, and I was
not conscious that I was doing anything more than the rest of them.

Then there came a day when the yellow-haired child---shall I call her
Kathy?--wanted to go to a pageant in a neighboring town. It was to
last two days, and there was to be a night parade, and floats and a
carnival. Many of the students were going, and it was planned that
Kathy and I should take a morning train on the first day, so that we
might miss nothing. Kathy's mother would come on an afternoon train,
and they would spend the night at a certain quiet hotel, while I was to
go with a lot of fellows to another.

Well, when that afternoon train arrived, the mother was not on it. Nor
did she come. Without one thought of unconventionality, I procured a
room for Kathy at the place where she and her mother would have
stopped. Then I left her and went to the other hotel to join my
classmates. But carnival-mad; they did not come in at all, and went
b