that had kept him awake about half the night, and
he forgot Buckhorn and the fact that he was a small boy on the streets
of a bald little prairie town. He was thousands of years and thousands
of miles away from me. He was a king's son in Babylon, commanding the
court-musicians to make sweet discourse for him. He was Saul
harkening to David. He was a dreamy-eyed Pict listening to music
wafted at dusk from a Roman camp about which helmeted sentries paced.
He was a medieval prince, falsely imprisoned, leaning from dark and
lonely towers to catch the strains of some wandering troubadour from
his native Southlands. He was a Magyar chieftain listening to the
mountain-side music of valleyed goat-herders with a touch of madness
to it. It engulfed him and entranced him and awoke ancestral tom-toms
in his blood. And I waited beside him until the afternoon sunlight
grew thinner and paler and my legs grew tired, for I knew that his
hungry little soul was being fed. His eye met mine, when it was all
over, but he had nothing to say. I could see, however, that he had
been stirred to the depths,--and by a tin mouth-organ and a
greasy-sided guitar!

To-night I found Dinkie poring over the pictures in my Knight edition
of Shakespeare. He seemed especially impressed, as I stopped and
looked over his shoulder, by a steel engraving of Gerome's _Death of
Caesar_, where the murdered emperor lies stretched out on the floor of
the Forum, now all but empty, with the last of the Senators crowding
out through the door. Two of the senatorial chairs are overturned,
and Caesar's throne lies face-down on the dais steps. So Dinkie began
asking questions about a drama which he could not quite comprehend.
But they were as nothing to the questions he asked when he turned to
another of the Gerome pictures, this one being the familiar old
_Cleopatra and Caesar_. He wanted to know why the lady hadn't more
clothes on, and why the big black man was hiding down behind her, and
what Caesar was writing a letter for, and why he was looking at the
lady the way he did. So, glancing about to make sure that Dinky-Dunk
was within ear-shot, I did my best to explain the situation to little
Dinkie.

"Caesar, my son, was a man who set out in the world to be a great
conqueror. But when he got quite bald, as you may see by the picture,
and had reached middle age, he forgot about being a great conqueror.
He even forgot about being so comfortably middle-aged and that it was