And there were letters for every conceivable emergency.  “To a Young Man who has quarrelled with his Master,” “Dismissing a Teacher,” “Inquiry for Lost Baggage,” “With a Basket of Fruit to an Invalid,” and “To a Gentleman elected to Congress.”  Rare indeed, in our earth life, would be the crisis unmet by this treasury of knowledge.  Not only was there an elevation of tone in our correspondence that winter, resulting from the persuasive activities of Mrs. Potts, but our writing became decorative with flourishes in “the muscular” and “whole-arm” movements.  We learned to draw flying birds and bounding deer and floating swans with scrolls in their beaks, all without lifting pen from paper.  Some of us learned to do it almost as well as the accomplished Mr. Gaskell himself, and almost all of us showed marked improvement in penmanship.  Doubtless Truman Baird did not, he being engrossed with oratory, striving to reproduce, “Hate—­the right foot advanced, the face turned to the sky, the gaze directed upward with a fierce expression, the eyes full of a baleful light,” or other phases of passion duly set down.  Not for Truman was the ornate full-arm flourish; he had observed that all Congressmen write very badly.

But my namesake may be said to have laid the foundations that winter for an excellent running chirography, under the combined stimuli of Mr. Gaskell’s curves and a hopeless passion for his school-teacher.

As my own teacher had been my own first love, I knew all that he suffered in voiceless longing for his fair one, throned afar in his languishing gaze.  I knew that he plucked flowers meant to be given to her, only to lay them carelessly on the floor beside his seat when school “took in,” lacking the courage to bestow them brazenly upon his idol as others did.  I knew, too, his thrill when she came straight down the aisle, took up the flowers with a glance of sweet reproof for him, and nested them in the largest vase on her desk.  But my poor affair had been in an earlier day, and my namesake wove novelty into the woof of his.  For in that wonder-book of the fertile-minded Gaskell was a form of letter which Calvin Blake Denney began to copy early in December, and which by the following spring he could write in a style that already put my own poor penning to the blush.  Did he write it a hundred times or five hundred, moved anew each time by its sweet potencies, its rarest of suggestions?  I know not, but it must have been very many times, for I would find the copies in his school books, growing in beauty of flourish day by day.  As well as if he had confessed it I knew that this letter was intended for the father of his love—­for old Sam Murdock, to be literal, who uncouthly performed for us the offices of drayman; but who, in my namesake’s eyes, shone pure and splendid for his relationship.  Doubtless the letter was never sent, but I am sure it was written each time with an iron resolve to send it.  Its title in the excellent book was “From a Lover to a Father on his Attachment to the Daughter,” and it ran:—­