True to form he reacted to these cheerful externals, and at once became filled with a new eagerness. A cloud seemed to pass away from his brain, a certain inhibition seemed to relax its hold upon him. As by the waving of a magic wand, he made a sudden swerve in his course, and became an earnest, almost fanatical student of books, in the light and joy of the new schoolhouse. Teachers were secondary; and in habit he became almost a recluse. For the idea had clarified that in books might be found a concentration, an increase in power; that books might be—and he later said they were—storehouses of what men had done, an explanation of their power to do, and that the specific knowledge stored within them might be used as tools of the mind, as men used tools of the hand. Louis saw consequences with extreme rapidity and daring once the first light of an initial idea broke upon him. His enthusiasms were pramagtic. He lost no time, once he saw an objective. His grammar-book in particular fascinated him. Here for the first time in all his schooling a light began to shine within a book and illumine his brain. Here opened up to him, ever more startling, ever more inspiriting, the structure of the language he spoke; its whys and wherefores. Here opened, ever enlarging, a world of things said, and to be said. The rigid rules became plastic as he progressed, then they became fluent; grammar passed into romance; a dead book became a living thing. He could not go fast enough. When would he reach the end?
And as the end approached nearer and nearer, there came forth from the book as a living presence, as a giant from the world of enchantment, with shining visage, man’s power of speech. Louis saw it all, but it left him feeble. He had taken grammar at one dose. As usual his imagination had far outsped any possibility of reasonable accomplishment. For Louis, as usual, saw too much at one time. He saw, at a glance, ends that would require a lifetime of disciplined endeavor to reach. And so, in a measure, it was with his other studies, though not so ardently. There was little romance to be found in his arithmetic. It was in the main material and philistine. Yet he saw use in it. He accepted it as a daily task and plodded. It was not his fault but his misfortune that it was handed to him dry. Geography he took to kindly. He could visualize it as a diagram and it extended, on paper, his boundaries far and wide. Topographically and racially he could not see into it, even though he was informed, for instance, that the Japanese and Chinese were half-civilized. He asked what civilized meant and was told that we were civilized. There were various other things in the geography that were not clear; he found difficulty in making images of what he saw in the book. In his history book he was lied to shamefully, but he did not know it. Anyway, he had to take some things on faith. The history book did not interest him greatly because the people described did not seem human like the people he knew, and the story was mostly about wars. He got the idea that patriotism always meant fighting, and that the other side was always in the wrong.
As to compositions, the pupils had to write one every so often, on a given topic. The first subject for Louis was “The Battle of Hastings.” He went at this dolefully, sought refuge in the encyclopedia, and in wabbly English produced a two-page essay weakly-hesitant and valueless; a mere task. He was marked low. The next subject was “A Winter Holiday in Boston.” Louis filled the air with snowflakes, merry bells, laughter, movement and cross movement, amusing episodes and accidents, all joyous, all lively. In simple boyish English, he made a hearty story of it, a word-picture; yes, the suggestion even of a prose poem, for it had structure. Within it was a dominant idea of winter that conveyed a sensation of color, of form. Louis was happy. He had hard work to confine himself to four pages. He was marked high. He was commended before the class. But the topics seldom fired him; as a rule they were academic, arid, artificial, having no relation to his life experiences, concerning which he might have said something worthwhile had he been given the chance. Another feature of the curriculum that went against the grain with Louis was the course in declamation, or “speaking pieces.” For Louis had a streak of bashfulness in his makeup, which, though invisible in his former street fights, came painfully into view when he must face the class and “speak out loud.” The ensuing torture of self-consciousness made him angry and rebellious. Besides, he had his opinions concerning various “pieces” and was not in the least backward in venturing them. He ridiculed the “Village Blacksmith” unmercifully.
His pet aversion was “Old Ironsides,” and it befell one day that he was to speak this very piece. As he approached the platform, he saw red; the class was invisible, no bashfulness now; teacher even, scarcely visible. His mind was made up; he mounted the platform, faced
