“They seem laughing at me!”
“Who?”
“Oh—I was talking to myself! The phantoms all about here, in the college archways, and windows. They used to look friendly in the old days, particularly Addison, and Gibbon, and Johnson, and Dr. Browne, and Bishop Ken—”
“Come along do! Phantoms! There’s neither living nor dead hereabouts except a damn policeman! I never saw the streets emptier.”
“Fancy! The Poet of Liberty used to walk here, and the great Dissector of Melancholy there!”
“I don’t want to hear about ’em! They bore me.”
“Walter Raleigh is beckoning to me from that lane—Wycliffe—Harvey—Hooker—Arnold—and a whole crowd of Tractarian Shades—”
“I don’t want to know their names, I tell you! What do I care about folk dead and gone? Upon my soul you are more sober when you’ve been drinking than when you have not!”
“I must rest a moment,” he said; and as he paused, holding to the railings, he measured with his eye the height of a college front. “This is old Rubric. And that Sarcophagus; and up that lane Crozier and Tudor: and all down there is Cardinal with its long front, and its windows with lifted eyebrows, representing the polite surprise of the university at the efforts of such as I.”
“Come along, and I’ll treat you!”