“Yes,” he admitted; “I suppose I ought to be thankful. I certainly enjoy great mercies. It’s a warm, crowded kind of life; plenty of affection,—plenty of anxiety too, to be sure. I like to have the boys around me; it keeps one’s heart fresh, though in a way it’s sometimes wearing to the nerves. Yes, I like the young rascals—I like them. But, of course, it has its drawbacks. Most careers have,” he added, in a burst of commonplace.
“It is not exactly the career that you had cut out for yourself,” I suggested, “when we talked our plans over, you remember, that last evening at New Haven.”
“No, it’s not,” he acknowledged; “but perhaps it is a better one. What was it I said then? I really don’t recall it. Something very silly, no doubt.”
“Oh, you said, in a general way, that you were going in for money and celibacy and selfishness,—just as you have not done.”
“Yes, yes; I know, I remember now,” he said, laughing. “Boys are great fools with their brag of what they are going to do and be. Life knocks it out of them fast enough; they learn to do what they must.”
“Do you ever write any poetry nowadays?”
“No, no; not I. The muse has given me the go-by completely. Except for some occasional verses for a school festival or something of the kind, which I grind out now and then, I’ve sunk my rhyming dictionary deeper than ever plummet sounded. The chief disadvantage of running a big school like this,” he continued, with a sigh, “is the want of leisure and retirement to enable a man to keep up his studies. Sometimes I actually ache for solitude—for a few weeks or months of absolute loneliness and silence. Mrs. Armstrong has fixed me up a nice little private study,—remind me to take you in there before you go,—where I keep my books, etc. But the children will find their way in, and then I’m seldom undisturbed anywhere for more than an hour at a time; there’s always some call on me,—something wanted that no one else can see to.”
“You ought to swap places with Berkeley for awhile. He’s got more leisure than he knows what to do with.”
“Berkeley! Well, what’s he up to now? Philately? Arboriculture? What’s his last fad? You’ve seen him lately, you said. I met him for a minute in New York, a few years ago, and he told me he was going to an old book auction.”
“He’s got genealogy at present,” I explained.