ear, however
beautiful it sounded. For example, there was the compelling utterance he
got from the two merry gentlemen who passed him at the gate one day. So
jolly were they with their songs and laughter that he followed them a
little way to where they sat under a tree and drank turn by turn from a
bottle. His ear caught the thing and his lips shaped it so cunningly
that they laughed more than ever. He returned to his gate, intoning it;
the fresh voice rose higher as the phrasing became more familiar. Then
he was on the porch, chanting as a bard from the mere sensuous beauty of
the words. Through the open door he saw three faces. The minister and
his wife were calling on his mother.

The immediate happenings need not be set down. After events again became
coherent he was choking back sobs and listening to the minister pray for
those of unclean lips. And the minister prayed especially for one among
them that he might cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord. He knew
this to mean himself, for his mother glared over at him where he knelt;
he was grateful for the kneeling posture at that moment; he would not
have cared to sit. But all he had learned was that if you are going to
use words freely it had much better be when you are alone; this, and
that the minister had enormous feet, kneeling there with the toes of his
boots dug into the carpet.

No sooner was this language spectre laid than another confronted him;
that of class distinction. Certain people were "low" and must be shunned
by the high, unless the high perversely wished to be thought equally
low. His mother was again the arbiter. Her rule as applied to children
of his own age wrought but little hardship. She considered other
children generally to be low, and her son feared them for their deeds of
coarsely humorous violence. But he was never quite able to believe that
his father was an undesirable associate.

In all his young life he had found no sport so good as riding on the
seat beside that father while he drove the express wagon; a shiny green
wagon with a seat close to the front and a tilted rest for one's feet,
drawn by a grand black horse with a high-flung head, that would make
nothing of eating a small boy if it ever had the chance. You drove to
incoming trains, which was high adventure. But that was not all. You
loaded the wagon with packages from the trains and these you proceeded
to deliver in a leisurely and important manner. And some citizen of