And yet we were fortunate in one way. In those days they read the Gettysburg Address to us as a model, and in spite of our resentment our sophomore hearts caught the glory and the awe of it. But in those days the art of text-book writing had not attained its present perfection, and the Gettysburg Address had not yet been edited as a classic with twenty pages of introduction and I don't know how many foot-notes. Am I wrong in supposing that somewhere in the high schools or the colleges this is what the young soul finds in the Gettysburg Address?:
Fourscore and seven years[1] ago our fathers[2] brought forth on this continent[3] a new nation,[4] conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition[5] that all men are created equal.[6] Now we are engaged in a great civil war,[7] testing whether that nation,[8] or any nation so conceived and so dedicated,[9] can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield[10] of that war.
[XVII]
REAL PEOPLE
Among the most remarkable people I have never met is the family that had just moved out of the apartment we were going to rent. My knowledge of those strangers is based entirely on odd bits of information casually furnished by the renting-agent in the course of a single interview. Yet they are more actual and alive to me than many people with whom I have lived in intimate communion for years. Is it our fate ever to meet? I look forward to the event and dread it. I look forward with eagerness to a new sensation, and I fear lest the reality fall short of the vivid image I have built up with the help of the renting-agent.
In the matter of picking out an apartment, it is an invariable rule that I shall inspect the place and decide whether I like it. This I do after Emmeline has paid down a month's rent and selected the wall-paper. On questions of such nature, Emmeline is the Balkan States and I am the European Concert. She creates a status quo and I ratify. In the present instance, however, I was really given a free hand. Emmeline admitted she was suffering from headache when she told the renting-agent that she rather liked the place. Later she recognised that the rooms were altogether too small. What had swayed her judgment was that the bedrooms had the sun in the morning and we should thus be saving on our doctor's bills. In this respect expensive apartments are like high-powered motor cars and a long summer vacation on the St. Lawrence. They may be all easily paid for by cutting in two the doctor's annual bills amounting to ninety-odd dollars. However, I understood that this time Emmeline would be glad to be overruled.
The European Concert had its first shock when it was confronted with the size of the nursery bedroom. The renting-agent called my attention to the wall-paper. It had a very pretty border, showing scenes from "Mother Goose"; this at once revealed the purpose for which the room was intended. But I pointed out to him that if we put a chest of drawers against the wall and a little armchair in the corner, the crib would come hard against the steam pipe and would project halfway across the window.