I shrugged my
shoulders in my dress just as he did in his dress coat, dropped my
head on one side, and pursed my mouth up on the left corner and let my
right eye droop as his does. Then I began--and for that five minutes I
_was_ Father. The speech just rolled off my eloquent tongue and
the people laughed in the right places, just as the people at the
college did, and the Colonel blew his nose like a trumpet when I said
the short sentences about the memorial table to be put in the hallway
to the "fellows who have gone," while the end-up, with its funny
little dedication to the immortals bound in leather that would live on
the library shelf and the ones hound in serge and corduroy that would
sit at the tables in reading-room, brought the storm of applause that
sounded like a tornado.
When I stopped being Father and came to my own self I was sitting
beside the Idol in the audience and watching Judge Luttrell slap
Father on the back and Mr. Chadwell laughing so that he and the
Colonel looked like jolly, bald-headed boys. Mr. Chadwell is as
disgracefully handsome as Pink, and doesn't look much older. And I
never saw my father's face look like it did to-night, and I had never
hoped to see him in a position that fitted him like the one on the
platform with Byrdsville's distinguished citizens.
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