Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/381

papers in his high hat, and that his coat stood away from his neck, round which he wore a low standing collar, with a black cravat. He seemed to carry in the pocket of his waistcoat an endless succession of eyeglasses; he would use a pair, take them down from his high nose, lay them on the table, forget them, and, when he wished to read again, draw another pair from his waistcoat pocket. And I went on thinking of him as he looked over his glasses on that evening when I had gone late into his study and found him bent over his desk with the "Satires" of Juvenal before him, studying his lesson for the morrow, he said. I thought he knew all the Latin there was left in this world, but, "Oh, no," he said, and added: "If you would sometimes study at this hour of the night perhaps——" He did not finish his sentence, since it finished itself. . . . "I don't exactly know how to render that passage, Professor," a student, blundering through an unmastered lesson, said in conciliatory accents one morning. "Ah, that has been evident for some time," my uncle replied. . . . And now there he lay in his coffin, on the spot in that dim chapel where he had so often stood up to address the students; he was gone with all those others whose portraits hung on the wall, men who had stood to me in my boyhood as the great figures of the world. I should see him walking under those trees no more, his tall form stooped in habitual meditation. . . . They were all big, those Whitlock forbears of mine, six feet tall every one of them, grim Puritans, I think, when they first came to this country three centuries ago. . . . And I had