"See," said he, "no sorrowful books, only Aristophanes and Lucian,
Horace, Rabelais, Moliere, Voltaire's novels, 'Gil Blas,'
'Don Quixote,' Fielding, a play or two of Shakespeare, a volume or so
of Swift, Prior's Poems, and Sterne—that divine Sterne! And a Latin
Grammar and Virgil for you, little boy. First, eat some snails."
But this I would not. So he pulled out two three-legged stools, and very soon I was trying to fix my wandering wits and decline mensa.
After this I came on every half-holiday for nearly a year. Of course the tenant of the glass-house was a nine days' wonder in the town.
A crowd of boys and even many grown men and women would assemble and stare into the glass-house while we worked; but Fortunio (he gave no other name) seemed rather to like it than not. Only when some wiseacres approached my parents with hints that my studies with a ragged man who lived on snails and garden-stuff were uncommonly like traffic with the devil, Fortunio, hearing the matter, walked over one morning to our home and had an interview with my mother. I don't know what was said; but I know that afterwards no resistance was made to my visits to the glass-house.
They came to an end in the saddest and most natural way. One September afternoon I sat construing to Fortunio out of the first book of Virgil's "Aeneid"—so far was I advanced; and coming to the passage—
"Tum breviter Dido, vultum demissa, profatur". . .
I had just rendered vultum demissa "with downcast eyes," when the book was snatched from me and hurled to the far end of the glass-house. Looking up, I saw Fortunio in a transport of passion.
"Fool—little fool! Will you be like all the commentators? Will you forget what Virgil has said and put your own nonsense into his golden mouth?"
He stepped across, picked up the book, found the passage, and then turning back a page or so, read out—
"Saepta armis solioque alte subnixa resedit."