All these things Horace was meditating beneath his ilex tree, being moved to evaluate his life by the chance appeal of his memory to that dead friend whose “white soul” had so often, when he was alive, proved a touchstone for those who knew him.  He was sure that in the larger issues Virgil would have given him praise on this afternoon; and with that thought came another which was already familiar to him.  It was less probing, perhaps, but more regretfully sad.  If only his father could have lived to see his success!  His mother he had not known at all, except in his halting, childish imagination when, one day in each year, he had been led by his father’s hand to stand before the small, plain urn containing her ashes.  But his father had been his perfect friend and comrade for twenty years.  He had been able to talk to him about anything.  Above all the reserves of maturer life, he could remember the confidence with which as a child he had been used to rush home, bursting with the gossip of the playground, or some childish annoyance, or some fresh delight.  He could not remember that he was ever scolded during his little choleric outbursts or untempered enthusiasms, and yet, somehow, after a talk with his father he had so often found himself feeling much calmer or really happier.  Anger in some way or other came to seem a foolish thing; and even if he had come in from an ecstasy of play, it was certainly pleasant to have the beating throbs in his head die away and to feel his cheeks grow cool again.  In looking back, Horace knew that no philosophy had ever so deeply influenced him to self-control and to mental temperance as had the common, kindly, shrewd man who had once been a slave, and whose freedom had come to him only a few years before the birth of his son.

And how ambitious the freedman had been for the education of his son!  Horace could understand now the significance of two days in his life which at their occurrence had merely seemed full of a vivid excitement.  One had come when he was ten years old, but no lapse of years could dull its colours.  On the day before, he had been wondering how soon he would be allowed to enter the village school, and become one of the big boys whom he watched every morning with round eyes as they went past his house, their bags and tablets hanging from their arms.  But on that great day his father had lifted him in his arms—­he was a little fellow—­and looking at him long and earnestly had said, “My boy, we are going to Rome next week, so that you may go to school.  I have made up my mind that you deserve as good an education as the son of any knight or senator.”  Horace had cried a little at first in nervous excitement, and in bewilderment at his father’s unwonted gravity.  But all that was soon forgotten in the important bustle of preparations for a journey to the Capital.  The whole village had made them the centre of critical interest.  Once a bald, thick-set centurion had met them on the street, and