“I k-k-know it is an offence against the gods,” said the culprit, with a scared face, “to bring the sacred words of Homer into the great world out of doors; but you do not know how he sustains me in my heavy tasks.”
“Homer, did you say?” inquired his mentor incredulously. “Homer; why then, that’s Greek!”
“Oh y-y-yes,” said the boy, his fear yielding somewhat to bewilderment that one of his mentor’s attainments should ply him with a question so unnecessary.
“You are not going to come it over James Dodson, my son, that you read Greek,” said that gentleman, renouncing his own magisterial air for one of protest and astonishment.
“I b-b-bear every word of all the sacred writings of Homer imprinted in my heart,” said the boy, with only a partial understanding of Mr. Dodson’s very visible surprise. “P-p-perchance after the callow days of our childhood have passed, when the mind is like sand, it is a violation of the dream knowledge that has grown up all about our hearts to turn yet again to those pages in which the great wonders were first revealed to us. But even to this hour I love to gaze on the printed pages which these long years have lain in my soul.”
Mr. Dodson paid no heed to the strange and incoherent phrases which proceeded from the lips of William Jordan, Junior. He was too greatly preoccupied with an examination of the curious volume that was now in his hands. After turning it over and inspecting it inside and out a look of immense perplexity settled upon his wizened countenance.
“My aunt!” he said, “it is Homer.”
He looked from the book to the boy, from the boy to the book.
“Luney,” he said, with slow-drawn solemnity, “you beat cock-fighting, you do.”
The boy quailed under a gaze, whose blank surprise he misinterpreted as some more truculent emotion.