He knew even then that the soft rock would not hold it many years, but
it gave him a poetic pleasure to contemplate the ravages of time as he
worked, and to think that the dimpled child with the sunny hair and the
sad, beautiful eyes had only gone before, that his tablet would some
time be washed away by the same devouring sea, and that in the sea of
time he, too, would sink before many years and be forgotten.
The short elegy he wrote was a bad mixture of ancient and modern thought
as to substance, figures, and literary form, for the boy had just been
dipping into classics at school, while he was by habit of mind a
Puritan. His composition was one at which pagan god and Christian angel
must have smiled had they viewed it; but perhaps they would have wept
too, for it was the outcome of a heart very young and very earnest,
wholly untaught in that wisdom which counsels to evade the pains and
suck the pleasures of circumstance.
There were only two people who discovered what Caius was about, and came
to look on while his work was yet unfinished.
One was an old man who lived in the one poor cottage not far away and
did light work for Day the farmer. His name was Morrison--Neddy Morrison
he was called. He came more than once, creeping carefully near the edge
of the cliff with infirm step, and talking about the lost child, whom he
also had loved, about the fearful visitation of the mother's madness,
and, with Caius, condemning unsparingly the brutality, known and
supposed, of the now bereaved father.
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