IX.


I read much less than I used to do; I think much more. Yet what is the
use of thought which can no longer serve to direct life? Better,
perhaps, to read and read incessantly, losing one's futile self in the
activity of other minds.

This summer I have taken up no new book, but have renewed my acquaintance
with several old ones which I had not opened for many a year. One or two
have been books such as mature men rarely read at all--books which it is
one's habit to "take as read"; to presume sufficiently known to speak of,
but never to open. Thus, one day my hand fell upon the _Anabasis_, the
little Oxford edition which I used at school, with its boyish sign-manual
on the fly-leaf, its blots and underlinings and marginal scrawls. To my
shame I possess no other edition; yet this is a book one would like to
have in beautiful form. I opened it, I began to read--a ghost of boyhood
stirring in my heart--and from chapter to chapter was led on, until after
a few days I had read the whole.

I am glad this happened in the summer-time, I like to link childhood with
these latter days, and no better way could I have found than this return
to a school-book, which, even as a school-book, was my great delight.

By some trick of memory I always associate school-boy work on the
classics with a sense of warm and sunny days; rain and gloom and a chilly
atmosphere must have been far the more frequent conditions, but these
things are forgotten. My old Liddell and Scott still serves me, and if,