Now, as I muse the longer of that fair young lady who lived next door to us, as I see myself crawling through the place with the pickets off, and recall beyond it the smell and taste of the warm Concords in my petty larcenies of a dozen autumns, then other things come back to me, of Letitia's youth, of its cares and sacrifice and its motherlessness. The Rev. David Primrose, superannuate divine, bard and scholar, lived mostly in a chair, as I recall him, and it was Letitia who wheeled him on sunny days when other girls were larking, who sat beside it in the bay-window, half-screened by her geraniums, reading to him when his eyes were weary, writing for him, when his hand trembled, those fine fancies that helped him to forget his sad and premature decay. She was his only child, his only housemaid, gardener, errand-boy, and "angel," as mother said, and the mater went sometimes to sit evenings with him lest Letitia should never know joys of straw-rides and taffy-pulls and church-sociable ice-cream and cake.
He had a fine, white, haggard face, too stern for a little child to care for, but less forbidding to a growing school-boy who had found by chance that it softened wonderfully with memories of that Rugby where Tom Brown went to school; for Dr. Primrose had conned his Xenophon within those very ivied-walls, and, what was more to Bertram Weatherby, under those very skies had fled like Tom, a hunted hare, working fleet wonders in the fields of Warwickshire.
"A mad March hare I was, Bertram," he would tell me, the light of his eyes blazing in that little wind of a happy memory, only to sink and go out again. Smoothing then with his fine, white hands the plaid shawl which had been his wife's and was now a coverlet for his wasted knees, he would say, sadly:
"Broomsticks, Bertram—but in their day there were no fleeter limbs in Rugby."
There on my upper shelf is an old, worn, dusty copy of the Odes of Horace, which I cannot read, but it bears on its title-page, in a school-boy's scrawl, the name and date for which I prize it:
"David Buckleton Primrose, Rugby, a.d. 18—."
He laughed as he gave it to me.
"Mark, Bertram," said he, "the 'a.d.'"
"Thank you, sir," I replied, tremulously. "You bet I'll always keep it, Mr. Primrose."