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#34;I knew from the first it would be fatal," he said; "I always knew we could not keep him long. Sometimes I fancied he would tarry long enough to sing a little like Keats, or to draw like Beardsley, or to make music like Schubert, and confound the wiseacres and pedants of the world, like those other immortal boys from Parnassus, who were sent to us by mistake. But be had too little to hold him back; less, even, than Keats. The meshes of the clay were too coarse to hold him. He rose from them, beautiful and still a child, like Cupid out of Psyche’s arms. They could not spare him up yonder. There are not many such, even on Parnassus. "

"I don’t care about what he could have done or been," I answered rebelliously. "I don’t think it matters so much about children’s souls. If only we had his dear little body with us, it would be enough. It was the little human boy that I loved. "

"No," said the Professor, shaking his head, "no, it was the soul. Why have we never loved any of the other children who have lived in this terrace? There have been enough of them. They were little animals of our common clay. But sometimes the old divinities reveal themselves in children. In this case it was inexplicable, as it always is. His people are common enough. Why should he have liked Flaxman’s drawings better than his picture books? Why should he have liked the story of Theseus’ boyhood in the Centaur’s cave better than Jack the Giant Killer? Why should he tell me that the two stars that peeped down into his crib between the white curtains were like the eyes of the Golden Helen? That counter-jumper of a father of his never heard of the Golden Helen. No, he simply had that divinity in him, that holiness of beauty which the hardest and basest of us must love when we see it. He was of that antique world, and he would have lived in it always, like Keats. In my Homer over there there is a little, sticky thumbmark on the margin of the picture of the parting of Hector and Andromache. He liked that picture best of all, because, he said, ‘it was so kind of Hector to take off his gleaming helmet not to frighten his little boy.’ He always said ‘gleaming helmet’; he loved the sound of the words. Sometimes I used to fancy that if I should speak the Greek words he would recognize them. At any rate, the Greek spirit was his. I have taught Homer all my life, and I know. He used to lie here on the rug by the hour with that book open before him, and I would have to speak to him again and again to get his attention. Perhaps he was remembering more about it all than the rest of us will ever know. "

The Professor got up and wandered aimlessly over to the revolving bookcase by the window, and took up his Homer, turned a few pages, though it was too dark to see anything, then threw it down resentfully.

"Do you know, I had set my heart on teaching him the fine old tongue some day—that boy in knickerbockers?" he said.

Then I told him of the strange fancy I had of the wood gods coming on the night that Jack-a-Boy died. "Perhaps," murmured the old gentleman, "perhaps. We believe things less probable every day. "

In the course of time the Professor settled down to Greek prosody again, and I to the giving of music lessons. We saw less of each other and our neighbors than formerly, for the bond which had drawn us all together was broken. Jack-a-Boy’s people moved away and left the city, and we did not speak of him any more. For his own sake I almost hoped that the Professor had forgotten. Christmas time came, when everyone was buying presents for the little children they loved, but we bought no presents in Windsor Terrace, and we did not even know whether they kept Christmas in Jack-a-Boy’s country. I saw the Professor’s light burning far into the night on Christmas Eve, and the next day we avoided each other. But on the night of the first of May the Professor came to my room with a box of flowers in his hand and asked me to go with him to hang a May basket for Jack-a-Boy. When we reached the quiet little spot under the lilac bushes in the cemetery we saw a woman’s figure alone by the white stone, and her flowers lay on the green turf. It was the Woman Nobody Called On, and she explained that since Jack-a-Boy’s people were so far away she had feared he would not be remembered, and she had come out to him alone. We returned to the city together, talking of him in low tones, as though we had always known each other. When we left her at her door I resolved then and there that I would call. When we reached our own number we sat down a moment on the porch, in the faint May starlight, and the moon was as it had been the year before—pale and wan, and curved like Artemis’ bow. The air of the spring night was alluringly soft and warm, and it seemed to revive the withered sentiments in one, and to replenish the wellheads long gone dry. The mockingbird owned by the old maid in Number 324 must have dreamed a Southern dream; a dream full of cypress swamps and live-oak boughs and sultry August nights on the bayou, for it broke out into a melody fit only for a tropical forest, a florid, coloratura number, full of brilliant cadenzas and trills and highly colored passages, entirely out of atmosphere in the grim, gray parlors of Number 324.