Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/431



" Is this to go on for ever? Here is the morning sun pouring in at your windows and widening every chink with its beams. The shadow is just touching the fifth line of the sundial and we are snoring enough to work off that indomitable Falernian! What are you going to do? The mad Dog-star has long been drying and baking the crops; the cattle are all lying under the branching elms!" So speaks one of my young lord's friends.

"What now, really, is that so? Won't somebody come quick? What? Nobody there?" The glassy bile swells big within him. "I'm just splitting," he shouts; till you would think that all the herds of Arcadia were setting up a bray. We now take up our book, and the two-coloured parchment, well cleansed of hair; some paper too, and the knotty reed-pen. Next we complain that the ink is thick and clots upon the pen; that when water is poured in, the blackness disappears, and that the pen sprinkles the diluted stuff in blots upon the paper.

Poor fool, and more of a fool every day! Is this the pass to which we have come? Why not rather go on like a pet dove, or like a child in some great man's house that asks to have its food cut up small, or refuses in a rage to listen to its mammy's lullaby? 345