II

But Abner remained for some time ignorant of "society's" willingness to
give him welcome. He was lodged in a remote and obscure quarter of the
city and was already part of a little coterie from which earnestness had
quite crowded out tact and in which the development of the energies left
but scant room for the cultivation of the amenities. With this small
group reform and oratory went hand in hand; its members talked to spare
audiences on Sunday afternoons about the Readjusted Tax. Such a
combination of matter and manner had pleased and attracted Abner from the
start. The land question was _the_ question, after all, and eloquence
must help the contention of these ardent spirits toward a final issue in
success. Abner thirstily imbibed the doctrine and added his tongue to the
others. Nor was it a tongue altogether unschooled. For Abner had left the
plough at sixteen to take a course in the Flatfield Academy, and after
some three years there as a pupil he had remained as a teacher; he became
the instructor in elocution. Here his allegiance was all to the old-time
classic school, to the ideal that still survives, and inexpugnably, in
the rustic breast and even in the national senate; the Roman Forum was
never completely absent from his eye, and Daniel Webster remained the
undimmed pattern of all that man--man mounted on his legs--should be.

Abner, then, went on speaking from the platform or distributing
pamphlets, his own and others', at the door, and remained unconscious
that Mrs. Palmer Pence was desirous of knowing him, that Leverett Whyland
would have been interested in meeting him, and that Adrian Bond, whose
work he knew without liking it, would have been glad to make him