When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune, Our chair a broad pumpkin -- our lantern the moon, Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team!
On all sides this poem was considered very fitting, and I went to the festival with that comfortable feeling one has when one is moving with the majority and is wearing one's best clothes.
I sat rigid with expectancy while my schoolmates spoke their "pieces" and sang their songs. With frozen faces they faced each other in dialogues, lost their quavering voices, and stumbled down the stairs in their anguish of spirit. I pitied them, and thought how lucky it was that my memory never failed me, and that my voice carried so well that I could arouse even old Elder Waite from his slumbers.
Then my turn came. My crimps were beautiful; the green harps danced on my freshly-ironed frock, and I had on my new chain and locket. I relied upon a sort of mechanism in me to say:
O greenly and fair in the lands of the sun, The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run.
In this seemly manner Whittier's ode to the pumpkin began. I meant to go on to verses which I knew would de-light my audience -- to references to the "crook-necks" ripening under the Sep-tember sun; and to Thanksgiving gath-erings at which all smiled at the reun-ion of friends and the bounty of the board.
What moistens the lip and brightens the eye!
What calls back the past like the rich pumpkin pie!
I was sure these lines would meet with approval, and having "come down to the popular taste," I was prepared to do my best to please.
After a few seconds, when the golden pumpkins that lined the stage had ceased to dance before my eyes, I thought I ought to begin to "get hold of my audience." Of course, my mem-ory would be giving me the right words, and my facile tongue running along re-liably, but I wished to demonstrate that "ability" which was to bring me fa-vour and fame. I listened to my own words and was shivered into silence. I was talking about "dark Plutonian shadows"; I was begging "Egypt" to let her arms enfold me -- I was, indeed, in the very thick of the forbidden poem.
I could hear my thin, aspiring voice reaching out over that paralysed audi-ence with:
Though my scarred and veteran legions Bear their eagles high no more;
And my wrecked and scattered galleys Strew dark Actium's fatal shore.
My tongue seemed frozen, or some kind of a ratchet at the base of it had got out of order. For a moment -- a moment can be the little sister of eter-nity -- I could say nothing. Then I found myself in the clutches of the in-stinct for self-preservation. I felt it in me to stop the giggles of the girls on the front seat; to take the patronising smiles out of the tolerant eyes of the grown people. Maybe my voice lost something of its piping insistence and was touched with genuine feeling; per-haps some faint, faint spark of the di-vine fire which I longed to fan into a flame did flicker in me for that one time.
I had the indescribable happiness of seeing the smiles die on the faces of my elders, and of hearing the giggles of my friends cease.
I went to my seat amid what I was pleased to consider "thunders of ap-plause," and by way of acknowledg-ment, I spoke, with chastened propri-ety, Whittier's ode to the pumpkin.
I cannot remember whether or not I was scolded. I'm afraid, afterward, some people still laughed. As for me, oddly enough, my oratorical aspira-tions died. I decided there were other careers better fitted to one of my physique. So I had to go to the trouble of finding another career; but just what it was I have forgotten.
