“It teaches a man to appreciate the Finer Things. It gives him the foundations of a liberal education. It trains his mind.”
“What good’s it going to do him when he goes to work?” said “Pap” Rheinhart. “It’s not going to teach him how to grow more corn.”
“Well—I’m not so sure of that,” said Mr. Leonard with a protesting laugh. “I think it does.”
“Pap” Rheinhart looked at him with a comical cock of the head. He had a wry neck, which gave his humorous kindly face a sidelong expression of quizzical maturity.
He had a gruff voice; he was full of rough kindly humor, and chewed tobacco constantly. His father was wealthy. He lived on a big farm in the Cove, ran a dairy and had a foundry in the town. They were unpretending people—German stock.
“Pshaw, Mr. Leonard,” said “Pap” Rheinhart. “Are you going to talk Latin to your farmhands?”
“Egibus wantibus a peckibus of cornibus,” said Tom Davis with sounding laughter. Mr. Leonard laughed with abstracted appreciation. The joke was his own.
“It trains the mind to grapple with problems of all sorts,” he said.
“According to what you say,” said Tom Davis, “a man who has studied Greek makes a better plumber than one who hasn’t.”
“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head smartly, “you know, I believe he does.” He joined, pleased, with their pleasant laughter, a loose slobbering giggle.
He was on trodden ground. They engaged him in long debates: as he ate his lunch, he waved a hot biscuit around, persuasive, sweetly reasonable, exhaustively minute in an effort to prove the connection of Greek and groceries. The great wind of Athens had touched him not at all. Of the delicate and sensuous intelligence of the Greeks, their feminine grace, the constructive power and subtlety of their intelligence, the instability of their character, and the structure, restraint and perfection of their forms, he said nothing.
He had caught a glimpse, in an American college, of the great structure of the most architectural of languages: he felt the sculptural perfection of such a word as [Greek word], but his opinions
