is barrier would whisper protests which had the hoarse
emphasis of pain. "O, shut up, I say... O, I say, shut up.... O, shut
it, can't you?" Once when a little boy admitted that he had heard of the
Highland claymore, Simmons literally hid his head inside his desk and
dropped the lid upon it in desperation; and when I was for a moment
transferred from the bottom of the form for knowing the name of Cardinal
Newman, I thought he would have rushed from the room.

His psychological eccentricity increased; if one can call that an
eccentricity which was a wild worship of the ordinary. At last he grew
so sensitive that he could not even bear any question answered correctly
without grief. He felt there was a touch of disloyalty, of unfraternal
individualism, even about knowing the right answer to a sum. If asked
the date of the battle of Hastings, he considered it due to social tact
and general good feeling to answer 1067. This chivalrous exaggeration
led to bad feeling between him and the school authority, which ended
in a rupture unexpectedly violent in the case of so good-humoured a
creature. He fled from the school, and it was discovered upon inquiry
that he had fled from his home also.

I never expected to see him again; yet it is one of the two or three
odd coincidences of my life that I did see him. At some public sports or
recreation ground I saw a group of rather objectless youths, one of whom
was wearing the dashing uniform of a private in the Lancers. Inside that
uniform was the tall figure, shy face, and dark, stiff hair of Simmons.
He had gone to the one place where every one is dressed alike--a
regiment. I know nothing more; perhaps he was killed in Africa. But when
England was full of flags and false triumphs, when everybody was talking
manly trash about the whelps of the lion and the brave boys in red, I
often heard a voice echoing in the under-caverns of my memory, "Shut
up... O, shut up... O, I say, shut it."

Cheese

My forthcoming work in five volumes, "The Neglect of Cheese in European
Literature" is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it
is doubtful if I shall live to finish it. Some overflowings from such
a fountain of information may therefore be permitted to springle these
pages. I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets
have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I
remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman