Destinies of men, Moirai,+ Moerae--they
accompanied all men indifferently. But Ker,+ the extraordinary
Destiny, one's Doom, had a scent for distant blood-shedding; and, to be
in at a sanguinary death, one of their number came forth to the very
cradle, followed persistently all the way, over the waves, through
powder and shot, through the rose-gardens;--where not? Looking back,
one might trace the red footsteps all along, side by [214] side.
(Emerald Uthwart, you remember, was to "die there," of lingering
sickness, in disgrace, as he fancied, while the word glory came to be
softly whispered of them and of their end.) Classic felicities, the
choice expressions, with which James Stokes has so patiently stored his
memory, furnish now a dainty embroidery upon every act, every change in
time or place, of their daily life in common. He finds the Greek or
the Latin model of their antique friendship or tries to find it, in the
books they read together. None fits exactly. It is of military glory
they are really thinking, amid those ecclesiastical surroundings, where
however surplices and uniforms are often mingled together; how they
will lie, in costly glory, costly to them, side by side, (as they work
and walk and play now, side by side) in the cathedral aisle, with a
tattered flag perhaps above them, and under a single epitaph, like that
of those two older scholars, Ensigns, Signiferi, in their respective
regiments, in hac ecclesia pueri instituti,+ with the sapphic stanza in
imitation of the Horace they had learned here, written by their old
master.

Horace!--he was, had been always, the idol of their school; to know him
by heart, to translate him into effective English idiom, have an apt
phrase of his instinctively on one's lips for every occasion. That boys
should be made to spout him under penalties, would have seemed
doubtless to that sensitive, vain, winsome poet, [215] even more than
to grim Juvenal, quite the sorriest of fates; might have seemed not so
bad however, could he, from the "ashes" so persistently in his
thoughts, have peeped on these English boys, row upon row, with black
or golden heads, repeating him in the fresh morning, and observed how
well for once the thing was done; how well he was understood by English
James Stokes, feeling the old "fire" really "quick" still, under the
influence which now in truth quickened, enlivened, everything around
him. The old heathen's way of looking at things, his melod