Mr. Pound was my model of deportment, my glass of fashion. I see him now as we used to sit, vis-a-vis, at his study table. Samson's physical strength came from his hair. From the same source, it seemed to me, Mr. Pound derived that mental vigor with which he pulled down the temples of ignorance and slew the thousand devils of unorthodoxy which sprang from my doubting mind. From the top of his head a red lock flamed up, licking the air; over its sides the hair tumbled in cataracts, breaking about his ears; then the surging hair lost itself in orderly currents which flowed, waving, from his cheeks, leaving a rift from which sprang a generous nose and a round chin with many folds. His mouth was formed for the enunciation of large words and pompous phrases. From it monosyllables fell like bullets from a cannon. He seldom descended to conversation. He declaimed. He sought to impress on me the importance of using resounding sentences which he said would keep reverberating in the caverns of the mind. For this effect he had a theory that words ending in "ation" and "ention" were especially fitted. Trumpet-words, he called them, brazen notes which penetrated the deepest crevices of the brain. I must admit that in the practice of his theory he was wonderfully successful, for after thirty years I can still hear his sonorous voice filling the church with the announcement that the "Jewish congregation was a segregation for the preservation of the Jewish nation." I can see him pausing in his discourse to lubricate his vocal chords with a glass of ice-water, and then drawing himself to his full height, fix his eyes on his hushed people and cry: "What did I say the Jewish congregation was? Let me refresh your recollection." His answer must ring to-day in the caverns of many minds. Others of his phrases, I know, still echo in my own. But this is because so often in my own room I practised declaiming them, striving to enunciate them with my mentor's finish.
Was it a wonder that I became a little Mr. Pound? I suppose, too, that I became a veritable little cad. Conscious of my advantages in birth and breeding, much impressed on me by my mother, I had never been intimate with the village boys. Now I shunned them altogether. To me they were thoughtless heathen and unprofitable company. I strove for a time to correct their evil ways and to bring them to repentance. That was something which I could properly do without unnecessary association. I had for my reward only taunts. They called me "Goody" and "Miss Malcolm," and like names contemplated to shame me from the course which I had chosen, but in the martyrdom which they made me suffer I only gloried, and I could have let them stone me to death and forgiven them, provided, of course, that Mr. Pound preached about me afterward and that my name were enrolled in the company of well-known martyrs. Looking back, I realize that I was playing. There was a fine excitement in being hunted in my comings and goings through the village. It became my Africa, where any tree might hide a deadly enemy, and any fence an ambush. I discovered secret passages through backyards. I matched cunning against overwhelming force, and sometimes, when the odds were not too great against me, I remembered Joshua and another David and turned on the Philistines and smote them right manfully. At other times the hostilities lagged, but they never ceased entirely, and often they broke out suddenly with increased fury. It was a mass and class war. To the butcher's son and the blacksmith's boy and their like, the restless masses, I was indeed a bumptious Malcolm. Conscious of the superior quality of the blood of the McLaurins, and a little inflated with the pride of wealth, I had long patronized them, so there was needed only my assumption of virtue to fan the flames. But as I grew in years and knowledge, and the days of my departure from the valley drew nearer, I relied less on my fists for protection and more on a defensive armor of dignity. I became less a target for missiles and more an object of jibes. These I met with contempt, for I was going to college; I was going to McGraw University, the alma mater of Mr. Pound, and this thought alone nerved me to step out of the course of a flying stone with unconcern and to move down the street with Pound-like mien.