Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/43

Rh hole into the brain. A piece of the brain was hanging out over his eye when they found him. It was in his garden. He had been training up a rose-tree that had been blown down by the wind. That about the piece of the brain hanging out over his eye has haunted me ever since I heard it Those clear steadfast eyes! It is horrible!'

I kept silence, scarcely thinking.

He went on in a low voice:

' The night before he left I was in his rooms, talking with him. He was heavy about leaving the old place. He said he felt somehow as if he were going away from the grave of some one he loved. I remembered that—afterwards. Well, among other things he spoke about you. He had seen you at some school he had been to examine, I forget the name now. You had recited a poem of Longfellow's, "The Psalm of Life," I think. He seemed very much struck with you. He said he thought you would be a great man some day. He said some other things about you, and asked me to look after you when you came here. He told me you were coming here soon Well, so I did, as much as I thought I ought to, for, don't you see, it's not good for a fellow high up in the school to do much for a small boy. It's not good for the small boy. It's better for him to fight out his battles alone. And I didn't think I was likely to leave—for some time at any rate. But my brother died: and my father, whose whole heart's in his business, asked me to—to give up my plan, and help him with it. So—I did.'

'What did you want to be, Clayton?' I said.

'Oh I'd a foolish idea of my own' (with a smile), 'about going up to the 'Varsity and studying Hebrew and science and all sorts of things and then going out to Palestine. You see I should have liked to have helped Blake if I could, and, when he died—why, the idea came into my head of trying to do what he hadn't been able to do. You know he was poor And he gave such a lot of what he had away. I believe he kept his mother and sister, too. I always thought so.—Any how (with another smile), there's an end to all those ideas of mine!'