By the middle of the year I had obtained such a grip on study that I was bold enough to incorporate two extra subjects in the week’s routine. Besides that, I conceived the idea of reading English history outside of class and then securing permission to pass an examination on it, a scheme in which the teacher acquiesced. I felt that I must make up for lost time and hungrily, voraciously threw myself at the privilege which fortune had brought me. I began to realize in my own mind what men called “enthusiasm in his work.” Every day seemed to me a momentous day of opportunity: a day in which I might atone for the educational privilege I had missed up to my twentieth birthday. When I saw Aborn, stately, gifted, and on his way towards his Master’s degree at twenty, I was made to realize how long a road I had before me and how energetic I should have to be in order to get anywhere in education from my elementary and preparatory studies. So I put in my studies an investment of interest and patient attention which I had put in no other work that I had ever done. The most outstanding interest that I had was the class in oratory. This class met on the top floor, under the rafters, in a room directly off from the chapel. It resembled the studio of a poor artist with its gray northern skylight and little windows high above the bare floor. The class included young men and women. Nearly all were preparing for religious work, as ministers, missionaries, and evangelists. One student, a shock-haired young Westerner with “temperament” and “personality,” who generally sat in the pose of an actor, was planning for the career of a public reader. After the preliminary weeks of physical gymnastics and throat clearing, and after we were able to say “Oh!” without making the flame of a candle flicker, we began on the real excitement of speaking Orations; I began with the traditional Patrick Henry, of course, and naturally, after long and patient rehearsals in my room credited myself with the fact that if the author of that thriller should chance to come into the oratorical studio on the morning when I planned to recite it before my professor, he would feel that his forceful utterance had passed into no mean mouth!