queerest of short jackets, standing beside a marble table against a
classic background; he is smiling still in undiminished hope and trust,
despite increasing vexations and crossings, meaningless lessons which had
to be learned, disciplines to rack an aspiring soul, and long,
uncomfortable hours in the stiff pew of the First Presbyterian Church.
Associated with this torture is a peculiar Sunday smell and the faint
rustling of silk dresses. I can see the stern black figure of Dr. Pound,
who made interminable statements to the Lord.

"Oh, Lord," I can hear him say, "thou knowest..."

These pictures, though yellowed and faded, suggest vividly the being I
once was, the feelings that possessed and animated me, love for my
playmates, vague impulses struggling for expression in a world forever
thwarting them. I recall, too, innocent dreams of a future unidentified,
dreams from which I emerged vibrating with an energy that was lost for
lack of a definite objective: yet it was constantly being renewed. I
often wonder what I might have become if it could have been harnessed,
directed! Speculations are vain. Calvinism, though it had begun to make
compromises, was still a force in those days, inimical to spontaneity and
human instincts. And when I think of Calvinism I see, not Dr. Pound, who
preached it, but my father, who practised and embodied it. I loved him,
but he made of righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying not joy,
but punishment, the, suppression rather than the expansion of
aspirations. His religion seemed woven all of austerity, contained no
shining threads to catch my eye. Dreams, to him, were matters for
suspicion and distrust.

I sometimes ask myself, as I gaze upon his portrait now, the duplicate of
the one painted for the Bar Association, whether he ever could have felt