We went silently through the familiar Paris streets, the stooping old man towering on one side of me, the rosy baby heavy on my shoulder. When we reached his door, his concierge saw us and came out to meet us, nodding knowingly to me, and behind his back, tapping her forehead. I took his great bony old hand for a last clasp and said good-by. He went away up the stairs led by the concierge. Three months after this I read in a newspaper a cabled notice of the death of the distinguished scholar, M. Paul Meyer, founder and for many years head of the École des Chartes. He died, so the notice said, “from an obscure form of aphasia.” “WHILE ALL THE GODS ...” “_While all the gods Olympus’ summit crowned, Looking from high to see the wondrous sight._” ILIAD, XXII. I was spading up the earth in the dahlia-bed, when the children came up, a shouting band of them, just out of school, and noticed that the angleworms were “out.” This first, indubitable sign of spring in Vermont always suggests to adolescent Vermonters the first fishing expedition. But ten-year-olds and under think of the early brood of first-hatched chicks. “Hey, Jimmy, _angleworms_!” “Carl, run get a can!” “Here’s a fat one!” They swooped down on me and squatted along the edge of the spaded earth, pecking and snatching and chattering like a flock of sparrows. As I spaded on, I heard bits of their talk, “Won’t the chicks just love them!” “First worms _those_ chicks ever saw.” “No, Carl, that’s too few, let’s wait till we get a lot. It’s such fun to drop in a whole bunch.” “They _love_ angleworms so!” Then I heard the inevitable fanciful suggestion from the imaginative one of the group, “I bet we seem to the chicks just like giants ... no, giants are always mean ... like gods.” They fell on this idea, chattering and snatching, as they had at the worms: “_Let’s_ be gods! I’ll be Jupiter.” “I want to be Mars.” “Loki! Loki!” “I want to be Thor!” “No, _I_ want to be Thor!” “I was just going to be Thor, myself!” Everybody wanted to be Thor, it seemed. They trooped off to the poultry-yard, still disputing the question. When I passed the brooder-house a little later, a group of exasperated gods hung over the low wire-netting, gesticulating and crying out on the idiocy of chicks. They fell on me for sympathy, and from their babbling account I made out that the chicks had acted just as chicks always act and always have acted from the beginning of time. The gods had proudly put down in the midst of the little world of their beneficiaries the mass of angleworm wealth which they had gathered with such good intentions of giving pleasure. “All they had to do was to pitch right in and enjoy themselves,” cried Jupiter, wrathfully.