least there was a bed
and where a ray of clean sunshine might greet his soul when departing on
the long journey; and there I found him lying perfectly quiet save for the
twitching of his hands outstretched on the counterpane. I thought a
glimmer of content lightened his dull eyes as I sat down beside him. I
talked with him a little, but he seemed scarcely to heed my words. Then
turning his head towards me he plucked from under his pillow an old
thumb-worn copy of _Virgil_ (so bedraggled and spotted that no second-hand
book-seller would have looked at it) and thrust it out to me, intimating
by a gesture that he would have me read to him. I asked him where I should
begin, and he held up two fingers as if to indicate the second book of the
_AEneid_; and there I began with the fall of Troy-town.

He listened with apparent apathy, though I know not what echoes the
sonorous lines awakened in his mind, until I came to the words:

Venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus.

I saw his hands clench together feebly here, and then there was no more
motion. Presently I looked into his face, and I knew that no sound of my
voice, nor any sound of the world, could ever reach him again; for the
story of his unspeakable sorrow, like the ruin of Troy, had been told to
the end. He had spoken not a single word; he had carried the silence of
his soul into the infinite silences of death. The secret of his life had
passed with him. I shall probably never know what early dreams and
ambitions had faded into this squalid despair. And his pitiful wan-faced
boy--who was the child's mother? I am glad I do not know; I am only glad I
can tell him of your love. I shall see that the father is buried decently
with a wooden slab to distinguish his grave from the innumerable dead who
rest in the earth. Might we not print above his body the last words of the
poem he seems to have loved so much: _Fugit indignata sub umbras_! For I
think it was the indignity of shame in the end that killed him. Is he not
now all that Caesar and Virgil are? Shall he not sleep as peacefully in his
pauper's bed as the great General Grant in that mausoleum raised by the
river's side?--Commonplace thoughts that came to me as I sat for a while
musing in the presence of death; but is not death the inevitable
commonplace that shall put to rout all our originality in the end?

And all the while our Jack was sitting perfectly motionless by the window,
looking out into