"They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky."
"Rather an old enemy, that," said Jan, grinning.
"Then, my good fellow, you're incapable of appreciating four of the most classically perfect lines in a modern language!"
Heriot had quite turned on Jan. It took Chips to explain their former acquaintance with the lines, which he did with much gusto. And then they all three laughed heartily over his misconstruction of "Still are thy quiet voices, thy nightingales, awake," in the second stanza, and roared at Jan's nostro loquendo in the first.
"But that's not the poem I mean," said Heriot, borrowing Jan's copy. "It's this 'Retrospect of School Life.' Can you stand it?"
"Rather, sir!"
And Heriot read a verse that made them hold their breath; then this one, with his head turned towards Jan, and a rich tremor in his virile voice:
"There courteous strivings with my peers,
And duties not bound up in books,
And courage fanned by stormy cheers,
And wisdom writ in pleasant looks,
And hardship buoyed with hope, and pain
Encountered for the common weal,
And glories void of vulgar gain,
Were mine to take, were mine to feel."
"Isn't that rather what we were driving at?" he asked of Jan.
Jan nodded. Chips begged for more, with a break in his voice. Heriot wagged his spectacles and went on. . .
