d, but
sadly and faintly. After a while he grew restless and seemed a little
wandering. His mind ran on his classics, and fell back on the Latin
grammar.

"Iris!" he said,--"_filiola mea!_"--The child knew this meant _my dear
little daughter_ as well as if it had been English.--"Rainbow!"--for he
would translate her name at times, "come to me,--_veni_"--and his lips
went on automatically, and murmured, "_vel venito!_"--The child came
and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could not warm, but
which shot its rays of cold all through her slender frame. But there she
sat, looking steadily at him. Presently he opened his lips feebly, and
whispered, "_Moribundus._" She did not know what that meant, but she saw
that there was something new and sad. So she began to cry; but presently
remembering an old book that seemed to comfort him at times, got up and
brought a Bible in the Latin version, called the Vulgate. "Open it," he
said,--"I will read,--_segnius irritant_,--don't put the light
out,--ah! _haeret lateri_,--I am going,--_vale, vale, vale_, good-bye,
good-bye,--the Lord take care of my child!--_Domine, audi_--_vel
audito!_" His face whitened suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes
and mouth. He had taken his last degree.

----Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very
brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view. A limited
wardrobe of man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good books,
especially classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of the
Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--these,
and a child's heart full of tearful recollections and strange doubts and
questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are the anodynes
of childish grief; such were the treasures she inherited.--No,--I
forgot. With that kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men's
first children,--frost-flowers of the early winter season,--the old
tutor's students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and
crying with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the
plain crib in which his _alter ego_, as he used to say, was swinging,
to hang over the little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the
minute, red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working
lips,--in that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a
smile, and which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant's
life the character of a _