l you that at the end of the grass plot where the
hedge is highest there is a yellow bee hive with seven bees that belong
to Dean Drone, you will realize that it is only fitting that the Dean is
reading in the Greek. For what better could a man be reading beneath the
blossom of the plum trees, within the very sound of the bees, than the
Pastorals of Theocritus? The light trash of modern romance might put
a man to sleep in such a spot, but with such food for reflection as
Theocritus, a man may safely close his eyes and muse on what he reads
without fear of dropping into slumber.

Some men, I suppose, terminate their education when they leave their
college. Not so Dean Drone. I have often heard him say that if he
couldn't take a book in the Greek out on the lawn in a spare half hour,
he would feel lost. It's a certain activity of the brain that must be
stilled somehow. The Dean, too, seemed to have a native feeling for the
Greek language. I have often heard people who might sit with him on
the lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he always refused. One
couldn't translate it, he said. It lost so much in the translation that
it was better not to try. It was far wiser not to attempt it. If you
undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing
immediately. I believe that many classical scholars feel this way, and
like to read the Greek just as it is, without the hazard of trying to
put it into so poor a medium as English. So that when Dean Drone
said that he simply couldn't translate it, I believe he was perfectly
sincere.

Sometimes, indeed, he would read it aloud. That was another matter.
Whenever, for example, Dr. Gallagher--I mean, of course, old Dr.
Gallagher, not the young doctor (who was always out in the country in
the afternoon)--would come over and bring his latest Indian relics to
show to the Dean, the latter always read to him a passage or two. As
soon as the doctor laid his tomahawk on the table, the Dean would
reach for his Theocritus. I remember that on the day when Dr. Gallagher
brought over the Indian skull that they had dug out of the railway
embankment, and placed it on the rustic table, the Dean read to him so
long from Theocritus that the doctor, I truly believe, dozed off in his
chair. The Dean had to wait and fold his hands with the book across his
knee, and close his eyes till the doctor should wake up again. And the
skull was on the table between them, and from above the pl