As Louis entered he saw, not this Mr. Wheelock, but a Mr. Wheelock, gray of face, sinister of eye, holding in his left hand a long rattan. “Miss Blank tells me you have grossly insulted her before the class. What have you to say for yourself?”
Louis was fearless and aggressive by nature. He had crossed his Rubicon. He made a manly apology, wholly sincere as regarded Miss Blank. This cleared the ground but not the issue. He saw the rattan, and with steady eye and nerve he quickly wove about it his plan of action. The rod should never touch him; it was to be a battle of wits. He boldly made his opening with the statement that he regarded the poem as bunkum. Mr. Wheelock sneered. He then went on to take the poem to pieces, line by line, stanza by stanza. Mr. Wheelock looked puzzled; he eyed Louis quizzically. He edged about in his chair. Louis went on, more and more drastically. Mr. Wheelock’s eyes began to twinkle, calm returned to his face, he dropped the rod. He laughed heartily: “Where in the world did you dig that up?” Then Louis let go, he waxed eloquent, he spread out his views—so long suppressed; he pleaded for the open, for honesty of thought for the lifting of a veil that hid things, for freedom of thought, for the right of interpretation, for freedom of utterance. He passionately unbosomed his longings. The head master, now sitting chin in hand, looked steadily at Louis, with grave, sad face. As Louis ceased, the master remained silent for a moment, then pulled himself together, relaxed, chuckled, and patting Louis on the shoulder said: “That was a pretty fine stump-speech, young man. When you got through with Holmes, you left his poem as tattered as his ensign. As for the rest: Irish accounts for that. I’m glad we had it out though. I might have thrashed you in anger. Go back to your class now, and hereafter be considerate of a woman’s feelings.” Louis returned to his room; before all the class he made full amends. Then, in his seat, he set to with a book. His plunge into grammar had not been in vain.
Thus Louis worked on and on, all by himself, as it were, digging into the solid vein of knowledge as a solitary miner digs; washing the alluvial sands of knowledge as a miner sifts—a young prospector grub-staked by an absentee provider now settled on the shores of a vast Lake far in the West.
Living again with his grandparents Louis felt at home once more. He had respites from the city bareness and baldness. He studied in the evenings, in the sitting room, unmindful of the family doings. He lost interest in playmates; waved aside all little girls as nuisances and inferior creatures—they became nonexistent. He rose early, at all seasons and in all weathers, before the family were awake, walked the mile to the depot, took the train to Boston, walked a mile to breakfast and another mile to school. Many a night he was awakened by the rattling sash, and listened to the sharp wind moaning, groaning, shrieking, whistling through the crevices with many a siren rise and fall, from the depths of sorrow to the heights of madness, from double forte to piannissimo as this weird orchestra of the countryside lulled him again to sleep. And many a morning, in pitch darkness, he lit his little lamp, broke the skin of ice at the pitcher’s top, washed in arctic waters, donned his clothing, neatly folded over a chair as Grandmamma had taught him—his stockings even, carefully turned in for orderliness, then left the house still in darkness and silence, to break his way, it may be, through fresh-fallen snow, knee-deep on the level, and as yet without a trail, his woolen cap drawn down, his woolen mittens well on, his books bound with a leather strap, held snug under the arm of his pea-jacket as the dim light at the depot shone nearer, and a distant double-toot announced the oncoming train, and the blinding headlight that shortly roared into view as he stood, waiting, on the platform.
Yet this was not heroism, but routine. It was an accepted part of the day’s doings, accepted without a murmur of other thought in days long since gone by.
Thus Louis worked, in gluttonous introspection, as one with a fixed idea, an unalterable purpose, whose goal lay beyond the rim of his horizon, and beyond the narrow confines of the casual and sterile thought of the day. Hence Louis was bound to be graduated with honors, as he was, the following June of 1870. There and then he received in pride, as a scholar, his first and last diploma. Never thereafter did he regard life with the gravity, the seriousness and the futility of a cloistered monk. That summer, he spent part of vacation time on the farm, and part of it within the primeval forest of Brown’s Track in the northern part of the State of New York. On his return to Boston in September, he passed the examinations, and at the age
