Hiram hardly understood him—he seldom quite understood his friend—but he answered, with a keen glance over the white snow, 'I love the winter, Mr. Audouin; but I apprehend I like the summer an' autumn best. You should jest have seen the crimson and gold on Cananagua Lake last fall; oh, my, the colours on the trees! nobody could ever have painted 'em. I took out my paints an' tried, but I wasn't anywhere like it, I can tell you; Mr. Mooller, he said he didn't b'lieve Claude or Turner could ever have painted a bit of Amurrican fall scenery.'
'Mr. Müller isn't a conclusive authority,' Audouin answered gravely, removing his cigar as he spoke; 'but on this occasion I surmise, Hiram, he was probably not far from a correct opinion. Still, Mr. Müller won't do for you any longer. The fact is, Hiram, sooner or later you must go to Europe. There's no teaching here good enough for you. I've made up my mind that you must go to Europe. Whether the deacon likes it or not, you've got to go, and we must manage one way or another.'
To Europe! Hiram's brain reeled round at the glorious, impossible notion. To Europe! Why, that was the wonderful romantic country where Tom Jones ran away with Amelia, where Mr. Tracy Tupman rode to Ipswich on top of the mail-coach, where Moses bought the gross of green spectacles from the plausible vagabond at the country fair. Europe! There were kings and princes in Europe; and cathedrals and castles; and bishops and soldiers; ay, he could almost believe, too, there were giants, ogres, ghosts, and fairies. In Europe, Sam Wellers waited at the wayside inns; mysterious horsemen issued darkling from arched castle gates; Jews cut pounds of flesh, Abyssinian fashion, from the living breasts of Venetian shipowners; and itinerant showmen wandered about with Earley's waxworks across a country haunted by masked highwaymen and red-coated squires, who beat you half to death for not telling them immediately which way the hare ran. As such a phantasmagoria of incongruous scenes did the mother continent of the American race present itself in some swimming panorama to Hiram's excited brain. It was almost as though Aladdin and the oneeyed calender had suddenly appeared to him in the familiar woods of Geauga County, and invited him forthwith to take the cars for Bagdad at the urgent personal request of the good Caliph Haroun al Raschid.
The boy held his breath hard, and answered in his self-restrained American manner, 'To Europe, Mr. Audouin! Well, I guess I should appreciate that, consid'able.'
'Yes, Hiram,' Audouin went on, 'I've made my mind up to that. Sooner or later you must go to Europe. But not just at once, my boy. Not till you're about nineteen, I should say; it wouldn't do you so much good till then. Meanwhile, we must put you to some other school. Bethabara has done its little best for you: you must go elsewhere, meanwhile. I mean that you shall go to some one of the eastern colleges, Yale if possible.'
'But what about father?' Hiram asked.
'Your father must be made to do as I tell him. Look here, Hiram, the fact is this. You're a boy whose individuality must be developed. The deacon mustn't be allowed to prevent it. I've taken you in hand, and I mean to see you through it. Look yonder, my boy, at the edge of the ice there on the creek; look at the musquash sitting in the sun on the brink of the open water eating a clam, and the clamshells he has left strewed along the shore and beach behind him. See him drop in again and bring up another clam, and stride sleek and shining from the water on to his little cliff of ice again. You and I know that that sight is beautiful. You and I know that it's the only thing on earth worth living for—that power of seeing the beautiful in art and nature—but how many people do you suppose there are in all America that would ever notice it? What percentage, Hiram, of our great, free, intelligent, democratic people, that sing their own praises daily with so shrill a voice in their ten thousand “Heralds,” and “Tribunes,” and “Courants,” and “Mirrors “? How small a percentage, Hiram; how small a percentage!'
The boy coloured up crimson to the very roots of his shaggy hair. It was such a very new point of view to him. He had always known that he cared for these things towards which all other boys and men were mere dull materialistic Gallios; but it had never before occurred to him that his doing so was any mark of a mental superiority on his part. Father had he thought that it betokened some weakness or foolishness of his own nature, for he wasn't like other boys; and not to be like other boys is treated so much as a crime in junior circles that it almost seems like a crime at last even to the culprit himself in person. So Hiram coloured up with the shame of a first discovery of his own better-ness, and merely answered in the same quiet self-restrained fashion, 'I apprehend, Mr. Audouin, there ain't many folks who pay much attention to the pecooliarities of the common American musk-rat.'
All the rest of the way home, Audouin plied the boy with such subtle flattery—not meant as flattery, indeed, for Audouin was incapable of guile; if he erred, it was on the side of too outspoken truthfulness: yet, in effect, his habit of speaking always as though he and Hiram formed a class apart was really flattery of the deepest sort to the boy's nature. At last they drew up at a neat wooden cottage in a small snow-covered glen, where the circling amphitheatre of spruce pines opened out into a long sloping vista in front, and the frozen arm of the great lake spread its limitless ice sheet beyond, away over in weird perspective toward the low unseen Canadian shore. The boy uttered a little sharp cry of delight at the exquisite prospect. Audouin noticed it with pleasure. 'Well, Hiram,' he said, 'here we are at last at my lodge in the wilderness.'
'I never saw anything in all my life,' the boy answered truthfully, 'one-thousandth part so beautiful.'