darkness, the wind, and incalculable speed. The past unrolled to him in separate and enormous visions; he built unending legends upon the pictures of the kings of Egypt, charioted swiftly by soaring horses, and something infinitely old and recollective seemed to awaken in him as he looked on fabulous monsters, the twined beards and huge beast-bodies of Assyrian kings, the walls of Babylon. His brain swarmed with pictures—Cyrus directing the charge, the spear-forest of the Macedonian phalanx, the splintered oars, the numberless huddle of the ships at Salamis, the feasts of Alexander, the terrific melee of the knights, the shattered lances, the axe and the sword, the massed pikemen, the beleaguered walls, the scaling ladders heavy with climbing men hurled backward, the Swiss who flung his body on the lances, the press of horse and foot, the gloomy forests of Gaul and Cæsarian conquests. Gant sat farther away, behind him, swinging violently back and forth in a stout rocker, spitting clean and powerful spurts of tobacco-juice over his son’s head into the hissing fire.
Or again, Gant would read to him with sonorous and florid rhetoric passages from Shakespeare, among which he heard most often Marc Antony’s funeral oration, Hamlet’s soliloquy, the banquet scene in Macbeth, and the scene between Desdemona and Othello before he strangles her. Or, he would recite or read poetry, for which he had a capacious and retentive memory. His favorites were: “O why should the spirit of mortal be proud” (“Lincoln’s favorite poem,” he was fond of saying); “’We are lost,’the captain shouted, As he staggered down the stairs”; “I remember, I remember, the house where I was born”; “Ninety and nine with their captain, Rode on the enemy’s track, Rode in the gray light of morning, Nine of the ninety came back”; “The boy stood on the burning deck”; and “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.”
Sometimes he would get Helen to recite “Still sits the schoolhouse by the road, a ragged beggar sunning; Around it still the sumachs grow, and blackberry vines are running.”
And when she had told how grasses had been growing over the girl’s head for forty years, and how the gray-haired man had found in life’s harsh school how few hated to go above him, because,
