f
greenery; in some fauns dance to the merry reed, and even the grave
centaurs peep out from their caves. Some bring moonlight, and some the
deep crimson of a rose's heart; some are blue, some red, and others will
tell of an army with silken standards and march-music. And throughout
all the sequence of suggestion, up above the little white men leap and
peep, and strive against the imprisoning wires; and all the big rosewood
box hums as it were full of hiving bees.

Spent with the rapture, I paused a moment and caught my friend's eye
over the edge of a folio. "But as for these Germans," he began abruptly,
as if we had been in the middle of a discussion, "the scholarship
is there, I grant you; but the spark, the fine perception, the happy
intuition, where is it? They get it all from us!"

"They get nothing whatever from US," I said decidedly: the word German
only suggesting Bands, to which Aunt Eliza was bitterly hostile.

"You think not?" he rejoined, doubtfully, getting up and walking about
the room. "Well, I applaud such fairness and temperance in so young a
critic. They are qualities--in youth--as rare as they are pleasing. But
just look at Schrumpffius, for instance--how he struggles and wrestles
with a simple {GREEK gar} in this very passage here!"

I peeped fearfully through the open door, half-dreading to see some
sinuous and snark-like conflict in progress on the mat; but all was
still. I saw no trouble at all in the passage, and I said so.

"Precisely," he cried, delighted. "To you, who possess the natural
scholar's faculty in so happy a degree, there is no difficulty at
all. But to this Schrumpffius--" But here, luckily for me, in came the
housekeeper, a clean-looking woman of staid aspect.

"Your tea is in the garden," she said, as if she were correcting a
faulty emendation. "I've put some cakes and things for the little
gentleman; and you'd better drink it before it gets cold."

He waved her off and continued his stride, brandishing an aorist over my
devoted head. The housekeeper waited unmoved till there fell a moment's
break in his descant; and then, "You'd better drink it before it
gets cold," she observed again, impassively. The wretched man cast a
deprecating look at me. "Perhaps a little tea would be rather nice," he
observed, feebly; and to my great relief he led the way into the garden.
I looked about for the little gentleman, but, failing to discover him, I
concluded he was absent-minded too,