constitutional with him--his innate and habitual longing for a world
altogether fairer than that he saw. The child could find his way in
thought along those streets of the old town, expecting duly the
shrines at their corners, and their recurrent intervals of garden-
courts, or side-views of distant sea. The great temple of the place,
as he could remember it, on turning back once for a last look from an
angle of his homeward road, counting its tall gray columns between
the blue of the bay and the blue fields of blossoming flax beyond;
the harbour and its lights; the foreign ships lying there; the
sailors' chapel of Venus, and her gilded image, hung with votive
gifts; the seamen themselves, their women and children, who had a
whole peculiar colour-world of their own--the boy's superficial
delight in the broad light and shadow of all that was mingled with
the sense of power, of unknown distance, of the danger of storm and
possible death.

To this place, then, Marius came down now from White-nights, to live
in the house of his guardian or tutor, that he might attend the
school of a famous rhetorician, and learn, among [46] other things,
Greek. The school, one of many imitations of Plato's Academy in the
old Athenian garden, lay in a quiet suburb of Pisa, and had its grove
of cypresses, its porticoes, a house for the master, its chapel and
images. For the memory of Marius in after-days, a clear morning
sunlight seemed to lie perpetually on that severe picture in old gray
and green. The lad went to this school daily betimes, in state at
first, with a young slave to carry the books, and certainly with no
reluctance, for the sight of his fellow-scholars, and their petulant
activity, coming upon the sadder sentimental moods of his childhood,
awoke at once that instinct of emulation which is but the other side
of sympathy; and he was not aware, of course, how completely the