I said I was sure, but inquired the special point of superiority.
'He can kill his mon as often as he likes,' said McCassius, grimly, 'and bring him to life again. Fufty times he has killed yon mon--fufty times!'
They were very nice to me about my books--but very honest! There was a certain stretcher-bearer, a homely old fellow with a horse-shoe moustache and mild brown eyes; not from the high-brow unit, but perhaps a greater reader than any of them; and one of those who eschewed the novel. _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (on top of Lenotre's _Incidents of the French Revolution_, and our two little volumes of _Elia_) had been his only dissipation until, our friendship ripening, he weighed me with his tranquil eyes and asked for _Raffles_. I seemed to detect a streak of filial piety in the departure, and gave him as fair warning as I could; but only the book itself could put him off. He returned it without a word to temper his forgiving smile, and took out _The Golden Treasury_ as a restorative. Poetry he loved with all his gentle soul; but when, at a later stage, he asked if I thought he could 'learn to write poetry,' the wounds of vanity were at least anointed.
He used to take down Mr. David Somervell's capital _Companion to the Golden Treasury_ from the Poetry Shelf; and it was delightful to watch his bent head wagging between text and note, a black-rimmed forefinger creeping down either page, and his back as round as it could possibly have been before the war. He told me he was a Northamptonshire shoemaker by trade; and though you would trust him not to scamp a sole or bump a stretcher, there was nothing to show that the war meant more to him than his last, or life more than a chance of reading--the shadow lengthening in the sunshine that he found in books. Once I said how I envied him all that he had read; very gently--even for him--he answered that he owed it all to his mother, who had taught him when he was so high, and would be eighty-one come Tuesday. The man himself was only forty; but he was one of those guileless creatures who make one unconsciously look up to them as elders as well as betters. And at the front, where the old are so gloriously young, and the young so pathetically old, nothing is easier than to forget one's own age: often enough mine was brought home to me with a salutary shock.