With furtive laughter we applauded the student of Augustine. Robin, who like Cedric at Torquilstone, was a little deaf in his Latin ear, asked to be allowed to read the passage for himself: but it happened most unfortunately that as the book was being handed to him, it fell, and the reference was lost, nor could it be found again. The conversation was hurriedly changed by Johnson, who congratulated the Canon on his intimate acquaintance with the Fathers, and also with the Latin language. “Some of us,” he went on to say, “get a little rusty in our dead languages. Last month I was dining with my squire (who, you know, is a scholarly man) and a clerical friend, who shall be nameless, was there. The squire reads the lessons for me: he does it well, and the people like to hear him. After dinner he suddenly asked me whether in reading the Revelation he ought to say ‘õ-mĕgã’ as a dactyl with the accent on the O, or ‘õ mégger’ as two words, if you understand me. I said the latter might be right, but it would be as pedantic as Samarĩa, or Alexandrĩa: I preferred the former. And my clerical brother volunteered approval: _he said it was õmĕgã in the original Hebrew_. And he made the statement quite with the air of a man who had the gift of tongues more than we all. The squire stared, but we made no remark, and the fellow’s complacency was undisturbed.” Oldbury remarked that not all of us lose our acquaintance with the classics. He had written lately to the Bishop in reply to a request for information as to church attendance: and had stated that on Sunday mornings the attendance was very good, especially in the case of aged people; but whether that was due to piety, or to the necessity of adducing regular church-going as a condition precedent of benefiting by Tomkins’ dole, he should be sorry to say. And the Bishop wrote back: “Sit dolus, an virtus, quis in hoste requirat?” Oldbury considered that neat. But Miller objected that it only went to show that even a bishop knew the second “Æneid.” “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” said a man opposite, who was the Diocesan Inspector of Religious Knowledge; “I was complaining to Squire B., who, you know, made his money in the Black Country, about the character of his schoolmaster, a notoriously intemperate man: “‘Well of course,’ replied the squire, ‘if we ever _found_ him drunk, we should give him his _sine quâ non_ at once.’” Goodfellow had been pondering silently. At this point he pushed his chair near Johnson’s, and whispered, “I say, did Joe Miller make up all that rot about St. Augustine?” “My dear chap,” replied Johnson soothingly, “what, all that? ‘Bradley’s Exercises’ couldn’t have done it right off: it would have taken Cicero all his time.”