I thought I must suddenly have learned all there is to know.

The page of the ancient reader over which I then mumbled is now before me.

"A Good Investment" was the title of the day's lesson, and I had been called upon to render the first paragraph.

With lightness, unrecking the great moment so perilously at hand, I had begun: "'Will you lend me two thousand dollars to establish myself in a small retail business ?' inquired a young man, not yet out of his teens of a middle-aged gentleman who was poring over his ledger in the counting room of one of the largest establishments in Boston." The iron latch rattled, the door swung fatefully back, our heads were raised, our eyes bored her through and through.
Then swung a new world for me out of primeval chaos, and for aeons of centuries I dizzied myself gazing upon the pyrotechnic marvel.
"_Continue, Calvin!_--if you ever expect to learn anything." The fabric of my vision crumbled.

Awake, I glared upon a page where the words ran crazily about like a disrupted colony of ants.