I was about to ask the reason, when the voice of Mrs. Vincent, Horace's aunt, came from behind the closed shutters of a window.
"Well, I don't, Aunt. Sam Edwards is here, and we've got to build this turtle-pen."
"I can't leave Sam here all alone, Aunt. 'Twouldn't be polite."
"Horace, come in the house instantly. You may bring Samuel with you."
"_Doesn't_ want to come, you mean. Wouldn't you like to hear me read to Horace, Samuel?"
I was greatly interested in the turtles, but I was also fond of being read to. Apparently I was going to lose the company of Horace, anyhow. Moreover, I was afraid of Horace's aunt. So I meekly said:--
"We can't leave the turtles like this Aunt,--they'll all get away."
"Horace, mind what I say this minute. You can make the turtles safe enough. I will give you three minutes longer, and if you are not indoors then, your uncle will punish you this evening."
We collected the wayward turtles and put them in a garden basket. A few seconds later we presented ourselves before Mrs. Vincent, who looked at us ominously over the top of a book. Horace sat down in one stiff-backed chair, and I in another. He began to screw his face into knots as soon as he saw the book.
It was unknown to me, and fifteen or twenty years were to elapse before I should know its title. Then, one day, reading Guizot's "History of France," I recognized a passage, and realized with what work we had been regaled,--when we wished to build a turtle-pen.
"Horace, be quiet. Sit up straight in your chair. Put your hand down."
She looked Horace over critically, and then began to read.
"'The old parliamentarians were triumphant; at the same time as Abbé Terray, Chancellor Maupeou was disgraced, and the judicial system he had founded fell with him. Unpopular from the first, the Maupeou Parliament had remained in the nation's eyes the image of absolute power corrupted and corrupting. The suit between Beaumarchais and Councillor Goëzman--'"
"Horace, if you are not still this instant, I will put you to bed!"
Horace's articulations dissolved into snuffles and whines; we both hitched and wriggled in our chairs, and the reading went on. We heard what Chancellor Maupeou said to the Duke de La Vrillière, and what M. Turgot wrote to Louis XVI,--if a process in which the brain took almost no part can be called hearing. These personages were strangers to me, but Horace greeted them as familiar enemies. I judged that he knew and hated them of old time.