bowing with much courtesy. I stepped down from the desk and
offered him a chair by the window, where he seated himself at once,
being sadly spent by his climb. I returned to my fixed seat behind
the teacher's desk, which gave him the lower place of a scholar.

"You ought to have the place of honor, Captain Littlepage," I
said.


"A happy, rural seat of various views,"

he quoted, as he gazed out into the sunshine and up the long wooded
shore. Then he glanced at me, and looked all about him as pleased
as a child.

"My quotation was from Paradise Lost: the greatest of poems,
I suppose you know?" and I nodded. "There's nothing that ranks, to
my mind, with Paradise Lost; it's all lofty, all lofty," he
continued. "Shakespeare was a great poet; he copied life, but you
have to put up with a great deal of low talk."

I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that
Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading; she
had also made dark reference to his having "spells" of some
unexplainable nature. I could not help wondering what errand had
brought him out in search of me. There was something quite
charming in his appearance: it was a face thin and delicate with
refinement, but worn into appealing lines, as if he had suffered
from loneliness and misapprehension. He looked, with his
careful precision of dress, as if he were the object of cherishing