Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/61

Rh nap after lunch, but to-day your coming disturbed him so, that he couldn't take it, and he is easily exhausted now.' Her voice too fell.

'I am sorry,' I said.

'Why should you be sorry?'

'To have disturbed him.'

'I didn't mean that! I meant that it had excited him, thinking you were coming, and so he couldn't get to sleep after lunch. But that wasn't your fault.'

We moved on in silence for a little. Then she said:

'How beautiful the sea is now, and the sky.'

We stopped a moment to look at them.

'I have never,' I said, 'seen the sea before that I can remember: and, I cannot tell you why, but it seems to make me wish now to laugh and then to cry.'

We walked on in silence again for some twenty steps. Then:

'It is so,' she said, 'sometimes, early in the morning, when I have come out, and the sun was shining, and everything seemed so happy, I have run down to the sea dancing and singing. But when I saw how it lifted itself up, and threw out its arms once—twice—over and over again—on to the sand; and it seemed so tired, so tired I have stood and pitied it: till I felt the tears all coming out of my eyes.—I think it is God who makes you pity the sea.'

I laughed, and we moved on together again.

Then we talked of Greek, and how we both loved it, and of Homer. And I could have cried out with pleasure when she said straight off the line:

,

which I had thought one of the most beautiful 'ideas' that I knew: the old man going in silence down by the loud-sounding sea. And then we traced the words with a stick on the clean smooth sand, and she said that she wished she knew how to put the accents on the words, for they didn't look quite right without them, and I said that the general rules for marking the accents were very simple, and explained about oxyton, paroxyton, proparoxyton, perispomen, properispomen, and other matters connected therewith.