Chapter 34 - Page 2

telling me when and by what
steamer they were to leave. 'She will reach there a Friday,' he
wrote, 'and would like to see you that evening at Fuller's'.

I had waited in Philadelphia, hoping I might have some word, to
give her a better thought of me, and, that night, after such a climax
of ill luck, well - I had need of prayer for a wayward tongue. I sent
home a good account of my prospects. I could not bring myself to
report failure or send for more money. I would sooner have gone to
work in a scullery.

Meanwhile my friends at the chalet were enough to keep me in
good cheer. There were William McClingan, a Scotchman of a
great gift of dignity and a nickname inseparably connected with his
fame. He wrote leaders for a big weekly and was known as Waxy
McClingan, to honour a pale ear of wax that took the place of a
member lost nobody could tell how. He drank deeply at times, but
never to the loss of his dignity or self possession. In his cups the
natural dignity of the man grew and expanded. One could tell the
extent of his indulgence by the degree of his dignity. Then his
mood became at once didactic and devotional. Indeed, I learned in
good time of the rumour that he had lost his ear in an argument
about the Scriptures over at Edinburgh.

I remember he came an evening, soon after my arrival at the
chalet, when dinner was late. His dignity was at the full. He sat
awhile in grim silence, while a sense of injury grew in his bosom.

'Mrs Opper,' said he, in a grandiose manner and voice that nicely
trilled the r's, 'in the fourth chapter and ninth verse of
Lamentations you will find these words - here he raised his voice a
bit and began to tap the palm of his left hand with the index finger
of his right, continuing: "They that be slain with the sword are
better than they that be slain with hunger. For these pine away
stricken through want of the fruits of the field." Upon my honour
as a gentleman, Mrs Opper, I was never so hungry in all my life.'

The other boarder was a rather frail man with an easy cough and a
confidential manner, lie wrote the 'Obituaries of Distinguished
Persons' for one of the daily papers. Somebody had told him once,
his head resembled that of Washington. He had never forgotten it,
as I have reason to remember. His mind lived ever among the
dead. His tongue was pickled in maxims; his heart sunk in the
brine of recollection; his humour not less unconscious and familiar
than that of an epitaph; his name was Lemuel Framdin Force. To
the public of his native city he had introduced Webster one fourth
of July - a perennial topic of his lighter moments.

I fell an easy victim to the obituary editor that first evening in the
chalet. We had risen from