They hurried toward me; they were waiting for me--Lena and
Tony and Anna Hansen.
"Oh, Jim, it was splendid!" Tony was breathing hard, as she always did
when her feelings outran her language. "There ain't a lawyer in Black Hawk
could make a speech like that. I just stopped your grandpa and said so to
him. He won't tell you, but he told us he was awful surprised himself, did
n't he, girls?"
Lena sidled up to me and said teasingly: "What made you so solemn? I
thought you were scared. I was sure you'd forget."
Anna spoke wistfully. "It must make you happy, Jim, to have fine thoughts
like that in your mind all the time, and to have words to put them in. I
always wanted to go to school, you know."
"Oh, I just sat there and wished my papa could hear you! Jim,"--Antonia
took hold of my coat lapels,--"there was something in your speech that made
me think so about my papa!"
"I thought about your papa when I wrote my speech, Tony," I said. "I
dedicated it to him."
She threw her arms around me, and her dear face was all wet with tears.
I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down the
sidewalk as they went away. I have had no other success that pulled at my
heartstrings like that one.
XIV
THE day after Commencement I moved my books and desk upstairs, to an empty
room where I should be undisturbed, and I fell to studying in earnest.
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