He was thin in the legs and shoulders, but round of face and marked there with strange designs that were partly a native complexion; but, if one is a candy boy, in constant company with newsboys, shiners, persons who carry no such merchandise but are apt to wish for it violently, one's complexion of course varies from day to day.
“Say, but I hit him! He bled on his clo's.” Tobin sometimes made this comment, “him” meaning different persons. There was a vein of fresh romance in him. Did not Sir Balin, or his like, smite Sir Lanceor, so that the blood flowed over his hauberk, and afterward speak of it with enthusiasm?
It was a cold December day in the year 188-, when the snow whirled without rest from morning chapel till the end of the day was signified by the first splutter of gas-jets. Among the hills where I was born that office was left to the sunsets and twilights, who had a manner of doing it, a certain broad nobility, a courtesy and grace. “One of God's days is over. This is our sister, the night.” The gas-jets were fretful, coquettish, affected. “It is an outrage! One is simply turned on and turned off!” Horatius Flaccus was social and intimate with me that day. “Exegi monumentum,” he remarked. “You will find it not easy to forget me.”
Monuments! At the University we lived among commemorative buildings; many a silent dusty room was dim with accumulation of thought; and there men labored for what but to make a name?
The statue outside represented one who took life seriously in his day, now with the whirling snow about it, the gas-jet in front snapping petulantly. “One is simply turned on and turned off!”
“Exegi monumentum,” continued Horatius Flac-cus. “This is my work, and it is good. I shall not all die, non omnis moriar.” It seemed natural to feel so. But how honorably the sunsets and twilights used to go their ways among the hills, contented and leaving not a wrack behind.
It was a better attitude and conduct, that serene security of clouds in their absolute death. “Non omnis moriar” was not only a boast, but a complaint and a protest.
Still, as to monuments, one would rather be memorialized by one's own work than by the words of other men, or the indifferent labor of their chisels.
“M'las ca-andy!”
“Come in, Tobin!”