Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/381

 papers in his high hat, and that his coat stood away from his neck, round which he wore a low standing collar, with a black cravat. He seemed to carry in the pocket of his waistcoat an endless succession of eyeglasses; he would use a pair, take them down from his high nose, lay them on the table, forget them, and, when he wished to read again, draw another pair from his waistcoat pocket. And I went on thinking of him as he looked over his glasses on that evening when I had gone late into his study and found him bent over his desk with the "Satires" of Juvenal before him, studying his lesson for the morrow, he said. I thought he knew all the Latin there was left in this world, but, "Oh, no," he said, and added: "If you would sometimes study at this hour of the night perhaps" He did not finish his sentence, since it finished itself "I don't exactly know how to render that passage, Professor," a student, blundering through an unmastered lesson, said in conciliatory accents one morning. "Ah, that has been evident for some time," my uncle replied And now there he lay in his coffin, on the spot in that dim chapel where he had so often stood up to address the students; he was gone with all those others whose portraits hung on the wall, men who had stood to me in my boyhood as the great figures of the world. I should see him walking under those trees no more, his tall form stooped in habitual meditation They were all big, those Whitlock forbears of mine, six feet tall every one of them, grim Puritans, I think, when they first came to this country three centuries ago And I had