The old man thought over the story.  Then he must have one look at the original.  So he took down the first volume and read it over.  When he came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she was engaged to and a friend of his took up the poor girl’s bloodless shape and carried it through the street, and how all the women followed, wailing, and asking if that was what their daughters were coming to,—­if that was what they were to get for being good girls,—­he melted down into his accustomed tears of pity and grief, and, through them all, of delight at the charming Latin of the narrative.  But it was impossible to call his child Virginia.  He could never look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in her bosom.

Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one.  She was a queen, and the founder of a great city.  Her story had been immortalized by the greatest of poets,—­for the old Latin tutor clove to “Virgilius Maro,” as he called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his memorable journey.  So he took down his Virgil,—­it was the smooth-leafed, open-lettered quarto of Baskerville,—­and began reading the loves and mishaps of Dido.  It wouldn’t do.  A lady who had not learned discretion by experience, and came to an evil end.  He shook his head, as he sadly repeated,

  “—­misera ante diem, subitoque accensa
     furore”;

but when he came to the lines,

  “Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
   Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,”

he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.

“Iris shall be her name!”—­he said.  So her name was Iris.

—­The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation.  It is only a question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries.  These all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in brick or stone and iron.  I don’t mean that you will see in the registry of deaths that this or that particular tutor died of well-marked, uncomplicated starvation.  They may, even, in extreme cases, be carried off by a thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very well in the returns, but means little to those who know that it is only debility settling on the head.  Generally, however, they fade and waste away under various pretexts,—­calling it dyspepsia, consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have passed through the successive stages of inanition.