The Minister's Charge; Or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel BarkerHowells, William Dean
General
The Minister's Charge; Or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker
Howells, William Dean
Boston (Mass.) -- Fiction; Clergy -- Fiction; Poets -- Fiction
and laughed at as he stood bewildered, with his lank bag in his hand. He
turned and walked back past the hotel again. He felt it an escape, after
all, not to have gone to sea; and now a hopeful thought struck him. He
would go back to the Common and watch for those fellows who fooled him,
and set the police on them, and get his money from them; they might
come prowling round again to fool somebody else. He looked out for a car
marked like the one he had followed down from the Common, and began to
follow it on its return. He got ahead of the car whenever it stopped, so
as to be spared the shame of being seen to chase it; and he managed
to keep it in sight till he reached the Common. There he walked about
looking for those scamps, and getting pushed and hustled by the people
who now thronged the paths. At last he was tired out, and on the Beacon
Street mall, where he had first seen those fellows, he found the very
seat where they had all sat together, and sank into it. The seats were
mostly vacant now; a few persons sat there reading their evening papers.
As the light began to wane, they folded up their papers and walked away,
and their places were filled by young men, who at once put their arms
round the young women with them, and seemed to be courting. They did not
say much, if anything; they just sat there. It made Lemuel ashamed to
look at them; he thought they ought to have more sense. He looked away,
but he could not look away from them all, there were so many of them. He
was all the time very hungry, but he thought he ought not to break into
his half-dollar as long as he could help it, or till there was no chance
left of catching those fellows. The night came on, the gas-lamps were
lighted, and some lights higher up, like moonlight off on the other
paths, projected long glares into the night and made the gas look sickly
and yellow. Sitting still there while it grew later, he did not feel
quite so hungry, but he felt more tired than ever. There were not so
many people around now, and he did not see why he should not lie down on
that seat and rest himself a little. He made feints of reclining on his
arm at first, to see if he were noticed; then he stretched himself out,
with his bag under his head, and his hands in his pockets clutching the
money which he meant to make those fellows take back. He got a gas-lamp
in range, to keep him awake, and lay squinting his eyes to meet the path
of rays running down from it to him. Then he shivered, and rose up with
a sudden start. The dull, rich dawn was hanging under the trees around
him, while the electric lamps, like paler moons now, still burned among
their tops. The sparrows bickered on the grass and the gravel of the
path around him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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