--No,--I
forgot. With that kindly sentiment which all of us feel for old men's
first children,--frost-flowers of the early winter season,--the old
tutor's students had remembered him at a time when he was laughing and
crying with his new parental emotions, and running to the side of the
plain crib in which his _alter ego_, as he used to say, was swinging,
to hang over the little heap of stirring clothes, from which looked the
minute, red, downy, still, round face, with unfixed eyes and working
lips,--in that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a
smile, and which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant's
life the character of a _first old age_, to counterpoise that _second
childhood_ which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by.
The boys had remembered the old man and young father at that tender
period of his hard, dry life. There came to him a fair, silver goblet,
embossed with classical figures, and bearing on a shield the graven
words, _Ex dono pupillorum_. The handle on its side showed what use the
boys had meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of
feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its destination.
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