still lawn below us and the lilacs, "These are my wife and children!"

It was whispered at length that his commentary on the first book of the
Deipnosophists was all but ready. All through a golden summer and a
quiet Long Vacation it had been maturing, and on the first night of the
October term he arranged his piles of notes about him, set a quire of
clean manuscript paper on his table, dipped pen in inkpot, and began to
muse on the first sentence.


An hour passed, and the page was not soiled. Across the still garden
came the sound of cab-wheels rattling over the distant streets.
The undergraduates were coming up for a fresh term. He had heard the
sound a hundred times, almost; and it did not concern him. He had no
lectures to prepare.

Another hour passed, and another. The noise of the cabs had died out,
and over him was creeping a sick fear, a certainty, that he could not
write a word. The subject was too immense. He had given his life to
Athenaeus, and now Athenaeus was a monster that one man's life and
knowledge would not suffice for. Having withheld his pen till he might
write adequately, he awoke to find that writing was impossible.
A horror took him as he pushed back his chair among the litter of
note-books, and, stepping to the window, threw the sash open.

Many stars were shining; and between them and the sleeping garden echoed
the clamour of a distant supper-party. He heard no words, only the
noise; but it filled his brain with a sense of the many thousand
supper-parties that the garden had listened to, of the generations that
had come and gone since his own first term, of the boys who had grown