Page:Across the Stream.djvu/151

Rh "No. Pour boiling tea over me if I do, and I shall come to myself."

"But what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to look at something bright. That spot of sun on the table-cloth will do. Then I shall just submerge, like a submarine, and tell you what Harry is writing at this moment, if that is the test you select. What fun it all is! I haven't done it, as I said, for ever so long. Oh, take a bit of paper, and write down what I say. I don't suppose I shall be able to remember it."

Again his voice sank, as he fixed his eyes on the bright spot he had indicated, and Jessie, watching him pencil and paper in hand, saw an extraordinary change come over his face. For a few seconds it got troubled, and his eyes stared painfully, while his breath came quickly in and out of his nostrils. Then he grew quite quiet again, his mouth smiled, and he spoke very slowly as if the words were dictated by a writer.

"It is hopeless to try to comprehend in the whole," he said, "the splendour of that unique age. We can only think of it in fragments. One afternoon there was a new play by Sophocles; another day Pericles made the funeral oration for the fallen; on another the great Propylæa to the Acropolis were finished, Socrates talked in the market-place, or supped with Alcibiades. In the space of a few years all those things happened, and as yet more than twenty centuries have failed to grasp their full significance. And in this, my last lecture to you"

Archie rubbed his eyes and sat up.

"He has finished for the present," he said.

There was a stir in the room just above them, where they sat in the garden, and Harry looked out.

"Any tea left?" he said.

Archie looked up.

"Hullo, Harry," he said. "I thought you were