page of the Georgics
where to-morrow's lesson began. It opened with the melancholy reflection
that, in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee.
"Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit." I turned back to the beginning of the third
book, which we had read in class that morning. "Primus ego in patriam
mecum {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} deducam Musas"; "for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the
Muse into my country." Cleric had explained to us that "patria" here
meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood
on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope,
at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately
come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the
palatia Romana, but to his own little "country"; to his father's fields,
"sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops."

Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have
remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to
leave the AEneid unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded
with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him
unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of
the Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to
the furrow; and he must have said to himself with the thankfulness of a
good man, "I was the first to bring the Muse into my country."

We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the
wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric intimately
enough to guess what that feeling was. In the evening, as I sat staring at
my book, the fervor of his voice stirred through the quantities on the
page before me. I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New
England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria.
Before I had got far with my reading I was disturbed by a knock. I hurried
to the door and when I opened it saw a woman standing in the dark hall.

"I expect you hardly know me, Jim."

The voice seemed familiar, but I did not recognize her until she stepped
into the light of my doorway and I beheld--Lena Lingard! She was so quietly
conventionalized by city clothes that I might have passed her on the
street without seeing her. Her black suit fitted her figure smoothly, and
a black lace hat, with pale-blue f