n and again that
the gods were cruel. Men were made weak and fallible, and then they were
punished because they failed or erred. The gods themselves were not at
all exempt from the sins, or, rather, mistakes for which they punished
men. He felt this with a special force when he read his Ovid. He
thought, looking at it in a direct and straight manner, that Niobe had a
right to be proud of her children, and for Apollo to slay them because
of that pride was monstrous.

His mind also rebelled at his Virgil. He did not care much for the
elderly lover, AEneas, who fled from Carthage and Dido, and when AEneas
and his band came to Italy his sympathies were largely with Turnus, who
tried to keep his country and the girl that really belonged to him. He
was quite sure that something had been wrong in the mind of Virgil and
that he ought to have chosen another kind of hero.

Shakespeare, whom he had been compelled to read at school, he now read
of his own accord, and he felt his romance and poetry. But he lingered
longer over the somewhat prosy ancient history of Monsieur Rollin. His
imaginative mind did not need much of a hint to attempt the
reconstruction of old empires. But he felt that always in them too much
depended upon one man. When an emperor fell an empire fell, when a king
was killed a kingdom went down.

He applied many of the lessons from those old, old wars to the great war
that was now raging, and he was confirmed in his belief that England and
her colonies would surely triumph. The French monarchy, to judge from
all that he had heard, was now in the state of one of those old oriental
monarchies, decayed and rotten, spreading corruption from a poisoned
center to all parts of the body. However brave and tenacious the French
people might be, and he knew that none were more so, he was sure they
could not prevail over the strength of free peoples like those who
fought under the British flag, free to grow, whatever their faults might
be. So, old Monsieur Rollin, who had brought tedium to many, brought
refreshment and courage to Robert.

But he did not bury himself in books. He had been a creature of action
too long for that. He hunted the wild cattle over the hills, and, now
and then, taking the dinghy he hunted the sharks also. Whenever he found
one he did not spare the bullets. His finger did not stop at the
trigger, but pulled hard, and he rarely missed.

But in spite of reading and action, time dragged heavily. T