tell of an army with silken standards and march-music. And
throughout all the sequence of suggestion, up above the little white men
leap and peep, and strive against the imprisoning wires; and all the big
rosewood box hums as it were full of hiving bees.

[Illustration: '_A great book open on his knee . . . a score or so
disposed within easy reach_']

Spent with the rapture, I paused a moment and caught my friend's eye
over the edge of a folio. 'But as for these Germans,' he began abruptly,
as if we had been in the middle of a discussion, 'the scholarship is
there, I grant you; but the spark, the fine perception, the happy
intuition, where is it? They get it all from us!'

'They get nothing whatever from _us_,' I said decidedly: the word German
only suggesting Bands, to which Aunt Eliza was bitterly hostile.

'You think not?' he rejoined doubtfully, getting up and walking about
the room. 'Well, I applaud such fairness and temperance in so young a
critic. They are qualities--in youth--as rare as they are pleasing. But
just look at Schrumpffius, for instance--how he struggles and wrestles
with a simple [Greek: gar] in this very passage here!'

I peeped fearfully through the open door, half dreading to see some
sinuous and snark-like conflict in progress on the mat; but all was
still. I saw no trouble at all in the passage, and I said so.

'Precisely,' he cried, delighted. 'To you, who possess the natural
scholar's faculty in so happy a degree, there is no difficulty at all.
But to this Schrumpffius----' But here, luckily for me, in came the
housekeeper, a clean-looking woman of staid aspect.

'Your tea is in the garden,' she said severely, as if she were
correcting a faulty emendation. 'I've put some cakes and things for the
little gentleman; and you'd better drink it before it gets cold.'

He waved her off and continued his stride, brandishing an aorist over my
devoted head. The housekeeper waited unmoved till there fell a moment's
break in his descant; and then, 'You'd better drink it before it gets
cold,' she observed again, impassively. The wretched man cast a
deprecating look at me. 'Perhaps a little tea would be rather nice,' he
observed feebly; and to my great relief he led the way into the garden.
I looked about for the little gentleman, but, failing to discover him, I
concluded he was absent-minded too, and attacked the 'cakes and things'
with no misgivings.

After a most successful and most learned tea