Camping -- Fiction; Manners and customs -- Fiction
"Madam," said the man, "you must excuse me if I ask you to recall your
question. I have a good name, and I belong to a very good family, but
there are reasons why I do not at present wish to avow that name. Some of
these reasons are connected with the report that I purposely visited the
family with the measles in order to get rid of my school; others are
connected with the inundation of my diocese, of which I shall speak;
others refer to my present indefinite method of life. There is reason to
suppose that the time is not far distant when my resumption of my family
name will throw no discredit upon it, but that period has not yet arrived.
Do you press your question, madam?"
"Oh no," said Mrs. Archibald; "it really makes no difference; and out here
in the woods a man may call himself a bishop or a cardinal or anything he
likes."
"Thank you very much," said he, "and I will continue to speak in figures,
and call myself a bishop."
"Where I was brought up," interpolated Phil Matlack, still standing behind
Mr. Archibald, "I was taught that figures don't lie."
"My good sir," said the speaker, with a smile, "in mathematics they don't,
in poetry and literature they often do. Well, as I was saying, my
diocese extended itself, my revenues were satisfactory, and I had
begun to believe that I had found my true work in life, when suddenly
there was a misfortune. There arrived in our town three apostles of
kindergartening--two of them were women, and one was a man. They had heard
of my system, and had come to investigate it. They did so, with the
result that in an astonishingly short time my diocese was inundated with a
flood of Froebelism which absolutely swept me away. With this bag,
this umbrella, and this costume, which has now become my wardrobe, I
was cast out in all my indefiniteness upon a definite world."
"And how did you get here?" asked Mrs. Archibald.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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