The ivy whines upon the wall,
    And whines and twines upon the wall,
    The yellow ivy upon the wall,
    Ivy, ivy up the wall.

Did anyone ever hear such drivel?  Lord Almighty!  Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall?  Yellow ivy; that was all right.  Yellow ivory also.  And what about ivory ivy?

The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter than any ivory sawn from the mottled tusks of elephants.  Ivory, IVOIRE, AVORIO, EBUR.  One of the first examples that he had learnt in Latin had run:  India MITTIT EBUR; and he recalled the shrewd northern face of the rector who had taught him to construe the Metamorphoses of Ovid in a courtly English, made whimsical by the mention of porkers and potsherds and chines of bacon.  He had learnt what little he knew of the laws of Latin verse from a ragged book written by a Portuguese priest.

    Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates.

The crises and victories and secessions in Roman history were handed on to him in the trite words in tanto DISCRIMINE and he had tried to peer into the social life of the city of cities through the words IMPLERE OLLAM DENARIORUM which the rector had rendered sonorously as the filling of a pot with denaries.  The pages of his time-worn Horace never felt cold to the touch even when his own fingers were cold; they were human pages and fifty years before they had been turned by the human fingers of John Duncan Inverarity and by his brother, William Malcolm Inverarity.  Yes, those were noble names on the dusky flyleaf and, even for so poor a Latinist as he, the dusky verses were as fragrant as though they had lain all those years in myrtle and lavender and vervain; but yet it wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world’s culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry.

The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his mind downward and while he was striving this way and that to free his feet from the fetters of the reformed conscience he came upon the droll statue of the national poet of Ireland.

He looked at it without anger; for, though sloth of the body and of the soul crept over it like unseen vermin, over the shuffling feet and up the folds of the cloak and around the servile head, it seemed humbly conscious of its indignity.  It was a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian; and he thought of his friend Davin, the peasant student.  It was a jesting name between them, but the young peasant bore with it lightly: 

—­Go on, Stevie, I have a hard head, you tell me.  Call me what you will.