“In the woods,” replied the juggler; and then realizing that he spoke with a covert meaning, “I lost my way.”
He slept the sleep of exhaustion that night, and the next morning he rose refreshed in body, and with the resolutions of his sober reflections confirmed.
“I am not such a snob as to care for the mere finery of existence, the mere wealth and show and fashion,” he argued within himself. “It’s partly the folly of my youth to care so much for those young fools over yonder,—so much like myself, or like what I used to be,—and dancing, and tennis, and wheeling, and flirting, and frivolity. A certain portion of these amenities has been the furniture of my life hitherto, and I am a trifle awkward at laying hold on it now without them. I love the evidences of good breeding, because I have been taught to respect them. I am prejudiced in favor of certain personal refinements, because I was reared to think a breach of them as iniquitous as to crash all the ten commandments at one fell swoop. I revere culture and literary or scientific achievement, because I appreciate what they require in mental capacity, and I am educated to gauge in a degree the quality of their excellence. I should like to have some conversation, occasionally, with people near my own calibre in social status and mind, and with similar motives and sentiments and way of looking at things. But I can live without a ballroom and a billiard-table, and, by the Lord, I’ll brace up like a man and do it contentedly.”
He went off cheerfully enough, after breakfast, to meet Tynes in the little schoolhouse. There he recited, in forgetfulness of his troubles, poems that he loved, and bits of ornate prose that he recalled, for he had a good memory; and he delivered sundry sound dicta touching the correct method of opening the mouth and of the pose of the body, and a dissertation on the physical structure of the vocal organs, illustrated by diagrams which he drew on the fly-leaf of the reading-book, and which mightily astonished Absalom Tynes, who learned for the first time that such things be. The leaves of the low-swinging elms rustled at the windows; the breeze came in and stirred up the dust; the flying squirrel who nested in the king-post of the roof, and who had had an early view of the juggler upon his first appearance in this house, came down and sat upon a beam and with intent eyes gazed at him. Tynes, in an unaccustomed station among the benches used by the congregation, watched and listened with unqualified commendation as Royce stood upon the platform and made the little house ring with his strong, melodious young voice. Abdicating the vantage-ground of spiritual preëminence, Tynes subordinated his own views, and when he read in his turn sundry of the secular bits of verse embalmed in the Reader—he seemed to think there were no books in the world but school-books and the Bible—he accepted corrections with the mildest docility, and preserved a slavish imitation of the spirited delivery of his preceptor. He rose into vigorous rebellion, however, when, with many a “Pshaw!” Royce rejected the continued use of the elementary Reader for the vital defect of having nothing in it fit to read, and took up, as matter worthy of elocutionary art, the Bible. Tynes, struck aghast by the change of delivery, the reverent, repressed, almost overawed tones, the deep, still gravity of the manner, listened for a time, then openly protested.
“That ain’t no way ter read the Bible,” he stoutly averred. “Ye hev got ter thunder it at the sinner, an’ rest yer v’ice on this word an’ lay it down on that, an’ lift it up”—
“Ding-dong it, you mean,” said the juggler, shifting quickly to his habitual tone.
“The sinner ain’t ter be kep’ listenin’ ter sech ez that. Jes’ let yer v’ice beat agin his ear till he can’t keep the gospel out ’thout he be deef,” Tynes contended.
“Yes, and his senses accommodate themselves to the clamor, and his consciousness sways back and forth with the minister’s voice, and he doesn’t hear more than one half of what is said, because the fellow yells so loud that the sound drowns out the sense. But the congregation looks pious, and folds its arms, and rocks itself back and forth with the rhythm of the sing-song, and the whole thing is just one see-saw. Do you believe that’s the way St. Paul preached on Mars’ hill?”
Tynes was suddenly bewildered. His manner assumed a sort of bridling offense; it seemed somewhat profane to speculate on the character of St. Paul’s delivery.
“Your way ain’t the way the men read at the Colbury revival, ennyhow,” he urged; for the union meeting, despite his wounded pride, had become a sort of standard.