e important
departments.

My Father grudged the time, but he felt it a duty to do something
to fill up these deficiencies, and we now started Latin, in a
little eighteenth-century reading-book, out of which my
Grandfather had been taught. It consisted of strings of words,
and of grim arrangements of conjunction and declension, presented
in a manner appallingly unattractive. I used to be set down in
the study, under my Father's eye, to learn a solid page of this
compilation, while he wrote or painted. The window would be open
in summer, and my seat was close to it. Outside, a bee was
shaking the clematis-blossom, or a red-admiral butterfly was
opening and shutting his wings on the hot concrete of the
verandah, or a blackbird was racing across the lawn. It was
almost more than human nature could bear to have to sit holding
up to my face the dreary little Latin book, with its sheepskin
cover that smelt of mildewed paste.

But out of this strength there came an unexpected sudden
sweetness. The exercise of hearing me repeat my strings of nouns
and verbs had revived in my Father his memories of the classics.
In the old solitary years, a long time ago, by the shores of
Canadian rapids, on the edge of West Indian swamps, his Virgil had
been an inestimable solace to him. To extremely devout persons,
there is something objectionable in most of the great writers of
antiquity. Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, Juvenal,--in
each there is one quality or another definitely repulsive to a
reader who is determined to know nothing but Christ and him
crucified. From time immemorial, however, it has been recognized
in the Christian church that this objection does not apply to
Virgil. He is the most evangelical of the classics; he is the one
who can be enjoyed with least to explain away and least to
excuse. One evening my Father took down his Virgil from an upper
shelf, and his thoughts wandered away from surrounding things; he
travelled in the past again. The book was a Delphin edition of
1798, which had followed him in all his wanderings; there was a
great scratch on the sheep-skin cover that a thorn had made in a
forest of Alabama. And then, in the twilight, as he shut the
volume at last, oblivious of my presence, he began to murmur and
to chant the adorable verses by memory.

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi,

he warbled; and I stopped my play, and listened as if to a
nightingale, until he reached