Elsie Venner | Page 8

's a pity, and you so near graduating! You'd better stay and
finish this course and take your degree in the spring, rather than break
up your whole plan of study.
I can't help myself, Sir,--the young man answered.---There 's trouble at
home, and they cannot keep me here as they have done. So I must look
out for myself for a while. It's what I've done before, and am ready to
do again. I came to ask you for a certificate of my fitness to teach a
common school, or a high school, if you think I am up to that. Are you
willing to give it to me?
Willing? Yes, to be sure,--but I don't want you to go. Stay; we'll make
it easy for you. There's a fund will do something for you, perhaps. Then
you can take both the annual prizes, if you like,--and claim them in
money, if you want that more than medals.
I have thought it all over,--he answered,--and have pretty much made
up my mind to go.
A perfectly gentlemanly young man, of courteous address and mild
utterance, but means at least as much as he says. There are some people
whose rhetoric consists of a slight habitual under-statement. I often tell
Mrs. Professor that one of her "I think it's sos" is worth the Bible-oath
of all the rest of the household that they "know it's so." When you find
a person a little better than his word, a little more liberal than his
promise, a little more than borne out in his statement by his facts, a
little larger in deed than in speech, you recognize a kind of eloquence
in that person's utterance not laid down in Blair or Campbell.
This was a proud fellow, self-trusting, sensitive, with family-
recollections that made him unwilling to accept the kind of aid which
many students would have thankfully welcomed. I knew him too well

to urge him, after the few words which implied that he was determined
to go. Besides, I have great confidence in young men who believe in
themselves, and are accustomed to rely on their own resources from an
early period. When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully,
the World, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to
find it come off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away
timid adventurers. I have seen young men more than once, who came to
a great city without a single friend, support themselves and pay for
their education, lay up money in a few years, grow rich enough to
travel, and establish themselves in life, without ever asking a dollar of
any person which they had not earned. But these are exceptional cases.
There are horse-tamers, born so,--as we all know; there are
woman-tamers, who bewitch the sex as the pied piper bedeviled the
children of Hamelin; and there are world-tamers, who can make any
community, even a Yankee one, get down and let them jump on its
back as easily as Mr. Rarey saddled Cruiser.
Whether Langdon was of this sort or not I could not say positively; but
he had spirit, and, as I have said, a family-pride which would not let
him be dependent. The New England Brahmin caste often gets blended
with connections of political influence or commercial distinction. It is a
charming thing for the scholar, when his fortune carries him in this way
into some of the "old families" who have fine old houses, and city-lots
that have risen in the market, and names written in all the stock-books
of all the dividend-paying companies. His narrow study expands into a
stately library, his books are counted by thousands instead of hundreds,
and his favorites are dressed in gilded calf in place of plebeian
sheepskin or its pauper substitutes of cloth and paper.
The Reverend Jedediah Langdon, grandfather of our young gentleman,
had made an advantageous alliance of this kind. Miss Dorothea
Wentworth had read one of his sermons which had been printed "by
request," and became deeply interested in the young author, whom she
had never seen. Out of this circumstance grew a correspondence, an
interview, a declaration, a matrimonial alliance, and a family of half a
dozen children. Wentworth Langdon, Esquire, was the oldest of these,
and lived in the old family-mansion. Unfortunately, that principle of the

diminution of estates by division, to which I have referred, rendered it
somewhat difficult to maintain the establishment upon the fractional
income which the proprietor received from his share of the property.
Wentworth Langdon, Esq., represented a certain intermediate condition
of life not at all infrequent in our old families. He was the connecting
link between the generation which lived in ease, and even