Complete Works

senses by our rapid drive from the railway station was agreeably strengthened within me.
    “We are now on the line A.B.,” I said to my companion, importantly.
    It was the name bestowed in my time on one of the sides of the Square by the senior students of that town of classical learning and historical relics.  The common citizens knew nothing of it, and, even if they had, would not have dreamed of taking it seriously.  He who used it was of the initiated, belonged to the Schools.  We youngsters regarded that name as a fine jest, the invention of a most excellent fancy.  Even as I uttered it to my boy I experienced again that sense of my privileged initiation.  And then, happening to look up at the wall, I saw in the light of the corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing an inscription in raised black letters, thus: “Line A.B.”  Heavens!  The name had been adopted officially!  Any town urchin, any guttersnipe, any herb-selling woman of the market-place, any wandering Boeotian, was free to talk of the line A.B., to walk on the line A.B., to appoint to meet his friends on the line A.B.  It had become a mere name in a directory.  I was stunned by the extreme mutability of things.  Time could work wonders, and no mistake.  A Municipality had stolen an invention of excellent fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece of cast-iron.
    I proposed that we should walk to the other end of the line, using the profaned name, not only without gusto, but with positive distaste.  And this, too, was one of the wonders of Time, for a bare minute had worked that change.  There was at the end of the line a certain street I wanted to look at, I explained to my companion.
    To our right the unequal massive towers of St. Mary’s Church soared aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their shaded sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others.  In the distance the Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of the old city wall.  In the narrow, brilliantly pale vista of bluish flagstones and silvery fronts of houses, its black archway stood out small and very distinct.
    There was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of a footstep for our ears.  Into this coldly illuminated and dumb emptiness there issued out of my aroused memory, a small boy of eleven, wending his way, not very fast, to a preparatory school for day-pupils on the second floor of the third house down from the Florian Gate.  It was in the winter months of 1868.  At eight o’clock of every morning that God made, sleet or shine, I walked up Florian Street.  But of that, my first school, I remember very little.  I believe that one of my co-sufferers there has become a much appreciated editor of historical documents.  But I didn’t suffer much from the various imperfections of my first school.  I was rather indifferent to school troubles.  I had a private gnawing worm of my own.  This was the time of my father’s last illness.  Every evening at seven, turning my back on the Florian Gate, I walked all the way to a big old house in a quiet narrow street a good distance beyond the Great Square.  There, in a large drawing-room, panelled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk, I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all over till the task of my preparation was done.  The table of my toil faced a tall white door, which was kept closed; now and then it would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through the crack, glide across the room, and disappear.  There were two of these noiseless nursing nuns.  Their voices were seldom heard.  For, indeed, what could they have had to say?  When they did speak to me it was with their lips hardly moving, in a claustral, clear whisper.  Our domestic matters were ordered by the elderly housekeeper of our neighbour on the second floor, a Canon of the Cathedral, lent for the emergency.  She, too, spoke but seldom.  She wore a black dress with a cross hanging by a chain on her ample bosom.  And though when she spoke she moved her lips more than the nuns, she never let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring note.  The air around me was all piety, resignation, and silence.
    I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not been a reading boy.  My prep. finished I would have