AS I remember the boys and girls who grew up with me, I think of them as artists, or actors, or travellers, or rich merchants. Each of us, by the time we were half through grammar school, had selected a career. So far as I recollect, this career had very lit-tle to do with our abilities. We merely chose something that suited us. Our energy and our vanity crystallised into particular shapes. There was a sort of religion abroad in the West at that time that a person could do almost anything he set out to do. The older people, as well as the children, had an idea that the world was theirs -- they all were Monte Cristos in that respect.
As for me, I had decided to be an orator.
At the time of making this decision, I was nine years of age, decidedly thin and long drawn out, with two brown braids down my back, and a terrific shyness which I occasionally overcame with such a magnificent splurge that those who were not acquainted with my peculiarities probably thought me a shamefully assertive child.
I based my oratorical aspirations upon my having taken the prize a num-ber of times in Sunday-school for learn-ing the most New Testament verses, and upon the fact that I always could make myself heard to the farthest cor-ner of the room. I also felt that I had a great message to deliver to the world when I got around it, though in this, I was in no way different from several of my friends. I had noticed a number of things in the world that were not quite right, and which I thought needed attention, and I believed that if I were quite good and studied elocution, in a little while I should be able to set my part of the world right, and perhaps even extend my influence to adjoining districts.
Meantime I practised terrible vocal exercises, chiefly consisting of a rau-cous "caw" something like a crow's favourite remark, and advocated by my teacher in elocution for no reason that I can now remember; and I stood be-fore the glass for hours at a time mak-ing grimaces so as to acquire the "ac-tor's face," till my frightened little sis-ters implored me to turn back into my-self again.
It was a great day for me when I was asked to participate in the Harvest Home Festival at our church on Thanksgiving Day. I looked upon it as the beginning of my career, and bought crimping papers so that my hair could be properly fluted. Of course, I wanted a new dress for the occasion, and I spent several days in planning the kind of a one I thought best suited to such a memorable event. I even picked out the particular lace pattern I wanted for the ruffles. This was before I submitted the proposition to Mother, however. When I told her about it she said she could see no use in getting a new dress and going to all the trouble of making it when my white one with the green harps was perfectly good.
This was such an unusual dress and had gone through so many vicissitudes, that I really was devotedly attached to it. It had, in the beginning, belonged to my Aunt Bess, and in the days of its first glory had been a sheer Irish linen lawn, with tiny green harps on it at agreeable intervals. But in the course of time, it had to be sent to the wash-tub, and then, behold, all the lit-tle lovely harps followed the example of the harp that "once through Tara's hall the soul of music shed," and dis-appeared! Only vague, dirty, yellow reminders of their beauty remained, not to decorate, but to disfigure the fine fabric.
Aunt Bess, naturally enough, felt ir-ritated, and she gave the goods to mother, saying that she might be able to boil the yellow stains out of it and make me a dress. I had gone about many a time, like love amid the ruins, in the fragments of Aunt Bess's splen-dour, and I was not happy in the thought of dangling these dimmed re-minders of Ireland's past around with me. But mother said she thought I'd have a really truly white Sunday best dress out of it by the time she was through with it. So she prepared a strong solution of sodium and things, and boiled the breadths, and every little green harp came dancing back as if awaiting the hand of a new Dublin poet.
The green of them was even more charming than it had been at first, and I, as happy as if I had acquired the golden harp for which I then vaguely longed, went to Sunday-school all that summer in this miraculous dress of now-you-see-them-and-now-you-don't, and became so used to being asked if I were Irish that my heart exulted when I found that I might -- fractionally -- claim to be, and that one of the Fenian martyrs had been an ancestor. For a year, even, after that discovery of the Fenian martyr, ancestors were a fa-vorite study of mine.
Well, though the dress became some-thing more than familiar to the eyes of my associates, I was so attached to it that I felt no objection to wearing it on the great occasion; and, that be-ing settled, all that remained was to select the piece which was to reveal my talents to a hitherto unappreciative -- or, perhaps I should say, unsuspecting -- group of friends and relatives. It seemed to me that I knew better than my teacher (who had agreed to select the pieces for her pupils) possibly could what sort of a thing best repre-sented my talents, and so, after some thought, I selected "Antony and Cleo-patra," and as I lagged along the too-familiar road to school, avoiding the companionship of my acquaintances, I repeated:
I am dying, Egypt, dying!
Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast, And the dark Plutonian shadows Gather on the evening blast.
Sometimes I grew so impassioned, so heedless of all save my mimic sorrow and the swing of the purple lines, that I could not bring myself to modify my voice, and the passers-by heard my shrill tones vibrating with:
As for thee, star-eyed Egyptian!
Glorious sorceress of the Nile!
Light the path to Stygian horrors With the splendour of thy smile.
I wiped dishes to the rhythm of such phrases as "scarred and veteran le-gions," and laced my shoes to the music of "Though no glittering guards sur-round me."
