his nearest neighbour, he must travel down to the Porth for it.

And this makes it the more marvellous that what I am about to tell,
happening as it did at the very gates of the Porth, should have escaped
the sharpest eyes in the place.

The Vicar's custom was to read with me for a couple of hours in the
morning and again for an hour and a half before dinner. We had followed
this routine rigidly and punctually for three months or so when, one
evening in June, he returned from the Porth a good ten minutes late,
very hot and dusty, and even so took a turn or two up and down the room
with his hands clasped behind his coat-tails before settling down to
correct my iambics.

"John Emmet is dead," he announced, pausing before the window with his
back towards me and gazing out upon the ill-kept lawn.

"Wasn't he the coxswain of the life-boat?" I asked.

"Ah, to be sure, you never saw him, did you? He took to his bed before
you came . . . a long illness. Well, well, it's all over!" Parson West
sighed. "He saved, or helped to save, a hundred and fifteen lives,
first and last. A hundred and fifteen lives!"

"I've heard something of the sort down at the Porth. A hundred and
fifty, I think they said. They seemed very proud of him down there."

"Why?" The Vicar faced round on me, and added after a moment abruptly--
"He didn't belong to them: he was not even born in this parish."

"Where then?"

He disregarded the question. "Besides, the number was a hundred and
fifteen: that's just the pity."

I did not understand: but he had seated himself at table and was running
through my iambics. In the third verse he underlined a false quantity
with blue pencil and looked up for an explanation. While I confessed
the fault, his gaze wandered away from me and fell upon his fingers
drumming upon the table's edge. A slant of red sunshine touched the
signet-ring on his little finger, which he moved up and down watching
the play of light on the rim of the collet. He was not listening.
By-and-by he glanced up, "I beg your pardon--" stammered he, and leaving
the rest of my verses uncorrected, pointed with his pencil to the
concluding one. "That's not Greek," he said.

"It's in Sophocles," I contended: and turning up the word in "Liddell
and Scott," I pushed the big lexicon under his nose.

For a moment he paid no heed to the action; did not seem to grasp the
meaning of it. Then for the first and last time in my acquaintance