ser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all
my clothes, even my hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I
considered them non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects
when they are playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table
placed directly in front of the west window which looked out over the
prairie. In the corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I
had made and painted myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark,
old-fashioned wall-paper was covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the
work of some German scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he was
sending for books from abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph
of the Tragic Theatre at Pompeii, which he had given me from his
collection.

When I sat at work I half-faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood
at the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it
with great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he
was out for an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to
linger and become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit
in, and if he found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind
of cigarettes he liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered,
parsimonious about small expenditures--a trait absolutely inconsistent
with his general character. Sometimes when he came he was silent and
moody, and after a few sarcastic remarks went away again, to tramp the
streets of Lincoln, which were almost as quiet and oppressively domestic
as those of Black Hawk. Again, he would sit until nearly midnight,
talking about Latin and English poetry, or telling me about his long
stay in Italy.

I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In
a crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no
platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired, his
lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested
they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed
being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of
imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much
in the heat of personal communication. How often I have seen him draw
his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a
figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image
that was in his brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before
one out of