The other evening we were all down at the school-house for an entertainment. The children spoke pieces, and then we had a dance. About eleven o’clock some of us went out to the entry-room and began to serve the ice-cream. One of my neighbors said, after a while, “Do you remember how Fairfax used to get all dressed up so nice, and then always stayed around outside to watch?” “Yes,” I remembered. “Sometimes,” said another one of the women, “sometimes when we’re out here like this, it seems to me when I look up quick and glance out there in the dark, as though I could almost see him there now.” After a time, some one else said, “’Twas a pity he never would come in.” PROFESSOR PAUL MEYER “Master of the Word.” I never could remember where I had read that phrase--perhaps as a child in an old story-book about enchanters; but I knew whom it described when I first saw Professor Meyer speaking to his class in the École des Chartes. Not in any metaphorical sense, but in the plain literal meaning of the phrase, was he Master of the Word. He made the title “Philologist” put on purple and gold. The sallow young seminarists in their scant black gowns, keen, pale, young students who had come from Russia, Italy, Roumania, and Finland, sat motionless and intent, their eyes fixed on him unwaveringly for the two long hours of these daily lectures. Words were the living creatures in that room. They were born before our eyes in the remote childhood of the race, and swept down through the ages till there they were in our own language, issuing every day from our own lips, an ironic reminder that all the days of our lives were no more than an hour in the existence of those disembodied and deathless sounds.