The Voice of the People | Page 7

which went on in an abstracted drawl.

"The most cel-e-bra-ted sys-tem of juris-pru-dence known to the world
begins, as it ends, with a code--" He was not reading, for the book was
closed. He seemed rather to be repeating over and over again words
which had been committed to memory.
"With a code. From the commencement to the close of its history, the
ex-posi-tors of Ro-man Law con-sistently em-ployed lan-guage which
implied that the body of their sys-tem rested on the twelve
De-cem-viral Tables--Dec-em-vi-ral--De-cem-vi-ral Tables."
"Bless my soul!" said the judge. The boy glanced up, blushed, and
would have risen, but the judge waved him back.
"No--no, don't get up. I heard you as I was going by. What are you
doing?"
"Learnin'."
"Learning! Dear me! What do you mean by learning?"
"I'm learnin' by heart, sir--and--and, if you don't mind, sir, what does
j-u-r-i-s-p-r-u-d-e-n-c-e mean?"
The judge started, returning the boy's eager gaze with one of kindly
perplexity.
"Bless my soul!" he said again. "You aren't trying to understand that,
are you?"
The boy grew scarlet and his lips trembled. "No, sir," he answered. "I'm
jest learnin' it now. I'll know what it means when I'm bigger--"
"And you expect to remember it?" asked the judge.
"I don't never forget," said the boy.
"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the judge for the third time.
For a moment he stood looking silently down upon the marble slab

with its defaced lettering. Of the wordy epitaph which had once
redounded to the honour of the bones beneath there remained only the
words "who departed," but he read these with a long abstracted gaze.
"Let me see," he said at last, speaking with his accustomed dignity.
"Did you ever go to school, Nicholas?"
"Yes, sir."
"When?"
"I went 'most three winters, sir, but I had to leave off on o'count o' pa's
not havin' any hand 'cep'n me."
The judge smiled.
"Ah, well," he returned. "We'll see if you can't begin again. My boy has
a tutor, you know, and his playmates come to study with him. He's
about your age, and it will give you a start. Come in to-morrow at nine,
and we'll talk it over. No, don't get up. I am going."
And he passed out of the churchyard, closing the heavy gate with a
metallic clang. Nicholas lay on the marble slab, but the book slipped
from his hands, and he gazed straight before him at the oriel window,
where the ivy was tremulous with the shining bodies and clamorous
voices of nesting sparrows. They darted swiftly from gable to gable,
filling the air with shrill sounds of discord, and endowing with
animation the inanimate pile, wrapping the dead bricks in a living
shroud.
On the other side swept the long, colourless grasses, rippling in faint
waves like a still lake that reflects the sunshine and swaying lightly
beneath myriads of gauzy-winged bees that flashed with a droning
noise from blade to blade, to find rest in the yellow hearts of the
damask roses. Across the white vaults and the low-lying marble slabs
innumerable shadows chased, and from above the gnarled old locust
trees swept a fringe of vivid green, the slender blossoms hanging in
tassels from the branches' ends, and filling the air with a soft and

ceaseless rain of fragrant petals. Pale as the ghosts of dead leaves, they
fell always, fluttering night and day from the twisted boughs, settling in
creamy flakes upon the bending grasses, and outlining in delicate
tracery the epitaphs upon the discoloured marbles.
Nicholas lay with wide-open eyes, looking up at the oriel window
where the sparrows twittered. On a near vault a catbird poised for an
instant, surveying him with bright, distrustful eyes. Then, with an
impetuous flutter of slate-gray wings, it fled to the poisonous oak on
the far brick wall. A red-and-white cow, passing along the lane outside,
stopped before the closed gate, and stood philosophically chewing the
cud as she looked within through impeding bars. From the judge's
garden came the faint sound of a negro voice as the old gardener
weeded the vegetables. Nicholas rolled over again and faced the
outstretched wings of the noseless angel on the nearest tombstone. The
loss of the nose had distorted the marble smile into a grimace, which
gave a leer to the remaining features. As the boy looked at it he laughed
suddenly, and his voice startled him amid the droning of bees. Then he
sat up and glanced at his brier-scratched feet stretched upon the slab,
and laughed again for the sheer joy of discord.

III
Nicholas followed the main street to its sudden end at King's College,
and turned into one of the diverging ways which skirted the
whitewashed plank fence of the college grounds, and led to what was