It was the most important, the most solemn, the most epoch-making event
of my school life. I read it, reread it, and read it again. I have not
been able to read it since; it is rather long! but how well I remember
it, and how short it seemed then! and oh! how short those
well-spent hours!
[Footnote A: Notre Dame de Paris, par Victor Hugo.]
That mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]! I wrote it on the flyleaf of all my
books. I carved it on my desk. I intoned it in the echoing cloisters! I
vowed I would make a pilgrimage to Notre Dame some day, that I might
hunt for it in every hole and corner there, and read it with my own
eyes, and feel it with my own forefinger.
And then that terrible prophetic song the old hag sings in the dark
slum--how it haunted me, too! I could not shake it out of my troubled
consciousness for months:
_Grouille, greve, greve, grouille,
File, File, ma quenouille:_
_File sa corde au bourreau
Qui siffle dans le preau.
[Greek:"'Anagkae!'Anagkae!'Anagkae_!"]
Yes; it was worth while having been a little French boy just for a few
years.
I especially found it so during the holidays, which I regularly spent at
Bluefriars; for there was a French circulating library in Holborn, close
by--a paradise.
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