"This," he said, smiling at my look of astonishment, "brings me up to
the time when we met. I came to college at the age of eighteen, with a
few hundred dollars in my pocket, some pregnant experience of the rough
side of the world, great confidence in myself and distrust of others,
and, I believe, a kind of instinct of good manners, which made me
ambitious of shining in society. You were a witness of my _debut_. Miss
Temple was the first highly educated woman I had ever known, and you saw
the effect on me!"
"And since we parted?"
"Oh, since we parted, my life has been vulgar enough. I have ransacked
civilized life to the bottom, and found it a heap of unredeemed
falsehoods. I do not say it from common disappointment, for I may say I
succeeded in every thing I undertook."
"Except Miss Temple," I said, interrupting, at the hazard of wounding
him.
"No. She was a coquette, and I pursued her till I had my turn. You see
me in my new character now. But a month ago, I was the Apollo of
Saratoga, playing my own game with Miss Temple. I left her for a woman
worth ten thousand of her--but here she is."
As Nunu came up the companionway from the cabin, I thought I had never
seen a breathing creature so exquisitely lovely. With the exception of a
pair of brilliant moccasins on her feet, she was dressed in the usual
manner, but with the most absolute simplicity. She had changed in those
five years from the child to the woman, and, with a round and
well-developed figure, additional height, and manners at once gracious
and dignified, she walked and looked the chieftan's daughter. St. John
took her hand, and gazed on her with moisture in his eyes.
"That I could ever put a creature like this," he said, "into comparison
with the dolls of civilization!"
We parted at Buffalo--St. John with his wife and the chiefs to pursue
their way westward by Lake Erie, and I to go moralizing on my way to
Niagara.
GRECIAN AND ROMAN ELOQUENCE.
By Ashur Ware.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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