Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/34

22 'Never, Bruce,' I said, looking up and into his eyes. He turned his onto the dried grass.

Then somehow we began to talk about birds, and he told me about how they paired in the spring.

He was sure birds had a sense of the beautiful. Darwin thinks so.

He paused, and ended, looking up over the tops of the trees below us.

After a little:

'Who is Darwin?' I said.

He looked round, and then to me:

'The biggest man, maybe, that has ever lived,' he said.

'Do you mean he's the greatest man who ever lived?' I asked.

'Yes.'

'I don't think he's as great a man as Sir Walter Scott,' I said.

'What do you know of Sir Walter Scott?'

'I have read two of his novels, Ivanhoe and The Talisman, and I am going to read them all. There are thirty-one. I counted them yesterday.'

'Yes?'

A pause.

Then, after a little, I asked him if he was not leaving this term? He said, Yes.

'Are you going to Oxford or Cambridge?'

'To neither. I am going to London.'

'Why don't you go to the 'Varsity?'

'Because I don't want to. I don't see the good of it.' Another pause. I sat with my hands clasped round my knees, looking over the river. Suddenly I thought I would ask him something. So I said:

'Bruce.'

'Yes.'

'Would you ever like to be a great man—a big man?'

He looked at me with a gather in his brows:

'Well,' he said, 'I suppose I might. Why?'

'Oh, I only wondered. I shall be a great man some day, before I die. And I like to think about it when I'm low, low in my spirits I mean. Now