We pass on. Let us take that dear little hymn lots of us learned at our mother's knee—
"There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall."
How I used to wonder what a green hill could possibly want with a city wall. Ah! the dear doubts of childhood! I shall be told that "without" meant "beyond." Another doubt was about "Llewellyn and his Dog." How the siege has helped us to join hands with childhood once more. Surely I haven't thought of the lines for many years. They run—
"The gallant hound the wolf had slain,
To save Llewellyn's heir."
I remember we had to write a composition on the poem, and having decided that it was the wolf that had killed the hound—just as one says, "The scanty bone the beggar picked"—I had to square matters so as to explain how the hound died a second time at the hands of Llewellyn. It's all misty now, but I at least remember propounding the theory that the Welsh chieftain, in his terror, must have mistaken the wolf for the hound, and consequently did him in for murdering the lost child. It was this incident, I believe, that induced my parents to select for me a career at the Bar.
That incident recalls another one later on. At school we had a delightful master who hated using chalk. He informed us that we were to write an essay on—
"Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword."
One promising fellow misheard the last word as "saw." He was rather an authority on saws, and treated us to a delightful treatise on saws in general, band-saws, hand-saws, rip-saws, fret-saws, and circular saws. As far as I remember, the drift of his argument was that a pen could merely write, whereas a saw could cut a piece of wood.
Once more, "Eheu! Fugaces postumi——"
I wonder where that lad is now. I should think he must be a large saw-miller somewhere—possibly asleep on a "pallet of straw" in France, and seeing "visions" of his beloved saws. Why not! God bless him. I've forgotten his name and even what he was like.