The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 3,672 pages of information about The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner.

The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 3,672 pages of information about The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner.

In fact, he was not thinking much about being good or being bad, but of trying his powers in a world which seemed to offer to him infinite opportunities.  His name—­Philip Burnett—­with which the world, at least the American world, is now tolerably familiar, and which he liked to write with ornamental flourishes on the fly-leaves of his schoolbooks, did not mean much to him, for he had never seen it in print, nor been confronted with it as something apart from himself.  But the Philip that he was he felt sure would do something in the world.  What that something should be varied from day to day according to the book, the poem, the history or biography that he was last reading.  It would not be difficult to write a poem like “Thanatopsis” if he took time enough, building up a line a day.  And yet it would be better to be a soldier, a man who could use the sword as well as the pen, a poet in uniform.  This was a pleasing imagination.  Surely his aunt and his cousins in the farmhouse would have more respect for him if he wore a uniform, and treat him with more consideration, and perhaps they would be very anxious about him when he was away in battles, and very proud of him when he came home between battles, and went quite modestly with the family into the village church, and felt rather than saw the slight flutter in the pews as he walked down the aisle, and knew that the young ladies, the girl comrades of the district school, were watching him from the organ gallery, curious to see Phil, who had gone into the army.  Perhaps the preacher would have a sermon against war, and the preacher should see how soldierlike he would take this attack on him.  Alas! is such vanity at the bottom of even a reasonable ambition?  Perhaps his town would be proud of him if he were a lawyer, a Representative in Congress, come back to deliver the annual oration at the Agricultural Fair.  He could see the audience of familiar faces, and hear the applause at his witty satires and his praise of the nobility of the farmer’s life, and it would be sweet indeed to have the country people grasp him by the hand and call him Phil, just as they used to before he was famous.  What he would say, he was not thinking of, but the position he would occupy before the audience.  There were no misgivings in any of these dreams of youth.

II

The musings of this dreamer in a tree-top were interrupted by the peremptory notes of a tin horn from the farmhouse below.  The boy recognized this not only as a signal of declining day and the withdrawal of the sun behind the mountains, but as a personal and urgent notification to him that a certain amount of disenchanting drudgery called chores lay between him and supper and the lamp-illumined pages of The Last of the Mohicans.  It was difficult, even in his own estimation, to continue to be a hero at the summons of a tin horn—­a silver clarion and castle walls would have been so different—­and Phil slid swiftly down from his perch, envying the squirrels who were under no such bondage of duty.

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The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.