He saw a great deal of Professor Hardage.  One morning as the two met, he said with more feeling than he usually allowed himself to show:  “Hardage, I am a lonesome old man; don’t you want me to come and see you every Sunday evening?  I always try to get home by ten o’clock, so that you couldn’t get tired of me; and as I never fall asleep before that time, you wouldn’t have to put me to bed.  I want to hear you talk, Hardage.  My time is limited; and you have no right to shut out from me so much that you know—­your learning, your wisdom, yourself.  And I know a few things that I have picked up in a lifetime.  Surely we ought to have something to say to each other.”

But when he came, Professor Hardage was glad to let him find relief in his monologues—­fragments of self-revelation.  This last phase of their friendship had this added significance:  that the Judge no longer spent his Sunday evenings with Mrs. Conyers.  The last social link binding him to womankind had been broken.  It was a final loosening and he felt it, felt the desolation in which it left him.  His cup of life had indeed been drained, and he turned away from the dregs.

One afternoon Professor Hardage found him sitting with his familiar Shakespeare on his knees.  As he looked up, he stretched out his hand in eager welcome and said:  “Listen once more;” and he read the great kindling speech of King Henry to his English yeomen on the eve of battle.

He laid the book aside.

“Of course you have noticed how Shakespeare likes this word ‘mettle,’ how he likes the thing.  The word can be seen from afar over the vast territory of his plays like the same battle-flag set up in different parts of a field.  It is conspicuous in the heroic English plays, and in the Roman and in the Greek; it waves alike over comedy and tragedy as a rallying signal to human nature.  I imagine I can see his face as he writes of the mettle of children—­the mettle of a boy—­the quick mettle of a schoolboy—­a lad of mettle—­the mettle of a gentleman—­the mettle of the sex—­the mettle of a woman, Lady Macbeth—­the mettle of a king—­the mettle of a speech—­even the mettle of a rascal—­mettle in death.  I love to think of him, a man who had known trouble, writing the words:  ‘The insuppressive mettle of our spirits.’

“But this particular phrase—­the mettle of the pasture—­belongs rather to our century than to his, more to Darwin than to the theatre of that time.  What most men are thinking of now, if they think at all, is of our earth, a small grass-grown planet hung in space.  And, unaccountably making his appearance on it, is man, a pasturing animal, deriving his mettle from his pasture.  The old question comes newly up to us:  Is anything ever added to him?  Is anything ever lost to him?  Evolution—­is it anything more than change?  Civilizations—­are they anything but different arrangements of the elements of man’s nature with reference to the preeminence of some elements and the subsidence of others?