These, moreover, utterly
trivial, and even ridiculous in themselves, assume to my fancy
adventitious importance, as connected with a period and a locality
when and where I recognize the first ambiguous monitions of the
destiny which afterwards so fully overshadowed me. Let me then
remember.
The house, I have said, was old and irregular. The grounds were
extensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of
mortar and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prison-like
rampart formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a
week--once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended by two ushers, we
were permitted to take brief walks in a body through some of the
neighboring fields--and twice during Sunday, when we were paraded in
the same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the one
church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school was
pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to
regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn
and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with countenance
so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing,
with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,--could this be he
who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments,
administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian Laws of the academy? Oh,
gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!
At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate.
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