my went trudging away under the continuous but unheed fire of
orders, and presently disappeared round a corner, leaving the veteran
chuckling feebly under his walnut tree and alone with the empty street.
All trace of what he had said seemed to have been wiped from the
grandson's mind; but memory has curious ways. Ramsey had understood
not a fifth nor a tenth of his grandfather's talk, and already he had
"forgotten" all of it--yet not only were there many, many times in the
boy's later life when, without ascertainable cause, he would remember
the sunlight falling upon the old man's white head, to make that
semblance of a glittering bird's-nest there, but with the picture came
recollections of words and sentences spoken by the grandfather, though
the listener, half-drowsily, had heard but the sound of an old,
earnest voice--and even the veteran's meaning finally took on a greater
definiteness till it became, in the grandson's thoughts, something clear
and bright and beautiful that he knew without being just sure where or
how he had learned it.

Chapter II

Ramsey Milholland sat miserably in school, his conscious being
consisting principally of a dull hate. Torpor was a little dispersed
during a fifteen-minute interval of "Music," when he and all the other
pupils in the large room of the "Five B. Grade" sang repeated fractions
of what they enunciated as "The Star Span-guh-hulled Banner"; but
afterward he relapsed into the low spirits and animosity natural to
anybody during enforced confinement under instruction. No alleviation
was accomplished by an invader's temporary usurpation of the teacher's
platform, a brisk and unsympathetically cheerful young woman mounting
thereon to "teach German."

For a long time mathematics and German had been about equally repulsive
to Ramsey, who found himself daily in the compulsory presence of both;
but he was gradually coming to regard German with the greater horror,
because, after months of patient mental resistance, he at last began to
comprehend that the German language has sixteen special and particular
ways of using the German article corresponding to that flexible bit of a
word so easily managed English--_the_. What in the world was the use of
having sixteen ways of doing a thing that could just as well be done in
one? If the Germans had contented themselves with insisting upon sixteen
useless variations for infrequent words, such as _hippopotamus_, for
instance, Ramsey m