Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/23

Rh speech over the body of Cæsar is highly creditable to him) and he receives the certificate.'

I cared neither for the prize nor for the certificate. I do not quite know what I was thinking about: but it was about something very far away, by the tops of blue misty mountains, and down the middle trickled a black stream from bowl to bowl. It was very sweet. So that when the prize-giving was over, and they went out crowding, I still sat in my place for a little, puzzled because the mountain and the black stream had gone away with a trail of mist.

Then, as I sat like that, thinking about the trail of mist that went away with the mountain and the stream, Mr. Blake came, bending his head, in through the far doorway. I looked at him.

Seeing me, he stepped down the passage between the chairs, and came to me on the form, and put his hand on to my shoulder lightly, and smiled with his lips. But I couldn't smile back again; for the mountain and the stream had gone away from me.

'You did well, little man,' he said at last. 'Where did you learn to recite poetry like that?'

'Yes, but I did not understand it all,' I said, 'the two first verses, I mean, and I don't care for the rest, till the last bit. But that is grand!' I looked up into his eyes.

He patted my shoulder twice gently:

'You go too quick, you go too quick, child! What can't you understand in the first two verses?'

'Well?'

'What does it mean?'

'And that the soul, which only slumbers, is dead.'

'But what does that mean?'

'Dead: that is, that there is an end of it. Some people (such foolish people!) say that when you die, there is an end of you. That is, that you have no soul. No such place as heaven! no such person as God! Longfellow says: Do not tell me that man's soul, which when we die only slumbers and will awake, perhaps soon, perhaps late, perhaps never at all, in a