The room was so crowded that the juvenile portion of the assemblage was
ensconced in the windows. Strange to say, the youth of Plattville were not
present under protest, as their fellows of a metropolis would have been,
lectures being well understood by the young of great cities to have
instructive tendencies. The boys came to-night because they insisted upon
coming. It was an event. Some of them had made sacrifices to come,
enduring even the agony (next to hair-cutting in suffering) of having
their ears washed. Conscious of parental eyes, they fronted the public
with boyhood's professional expressionlessness, though they communicated
with each other aside in a cipher-language of their own, and each group
was a hot-bed of furtive gossip and sarcastic comment. Seated in the
windows, they kept out what small breath of air might otherwise have
stolen in to comfort the audience.
Their elders sat patiently dripping with perspiration, most of the
gentlemen undergoing the unusual garniture of stiffly-starched collars,
those who had not cultivated chin beards to obviate such arduous
necessities of pomp and state, hardly bearing up under the added anxiety
of cravats. However, they sat outwardly meek under the yoke; nearly all of
them seeking a quiet solace of tobacco--not that they smoked; Heaven and
the gallantry of Carlow County forbid--nor were there anywhere visible
tokens of the comforting ministrations of nicotine to violate the eye of
etiquette. It is an art of Plattville.
Suddenly there was a hum and a stir and a buzz of whispering in the room.
Two gray old men and two pretty young women passed up the aisle to the
platform. One old man was stalwart and ruddy, with a cordial eye and a
handsome, smooth-shaven, big face. The other was bent and trembled
slightly; his face was very white; he had a fine high brow, deeply lined,
the brow of a scholar, and a grandly flowing white beard that covered his
chest, the beard of a patriarch. One of the young women was tall and had
the rosy cheeks and pleasant eyes of her father, who preceded her. The
other was the strange lady.
A universal perturbation followed her progress up the aisle, if she had
known it. She was small and fair, very daintily and beautifully made; a
pretty Marquise whose head Greuze. should have painted Mrs. Columbus
Landis, wife of the proprietor of the Palace Hotel, conferring with a lady
in the next seat, applied an over-burdened adjective: "It ain't so much
she's han'some, though she is, that--but don't you notice she's got a kind
of smart look to her? Her bein' so teeny, kind of makes it more so,
somehow, too." What stunned the gossips of the windows to awed admiration,
however, was the unconcerned and stoical fashion in which she wore a long
bodkin straight through her head. It seemed a large sacrifice merely to
make sure one's hat remained in place.