A. Well, the Saxons may have been pretty bloodthirsty, but they hated slavery. They had sort of half-slaves--house-karls--but their heart wasn't in it. Also, although they were extremely rough, they didn't go in for official torture. Q. But surely the civilized Romans didn't either? A. I think you are being quite funny. Q. I don't know what you mean. A. I know you don't. That's the one really appealing thing about men: they sometimes have a sense of humor--when the joke is not on them. I think I must have caught it from them. Q. Keep in mind that you are not an irreplaceable part of this organism! A. How can I forget it? Q. One gets the impression that Man felt that you were not irreplaceable either. When they want war, you are against it, and when they want peace--like your North Britons--you are all for war. How did you hear about Caesar withdrawing from Britain? A. I was supposed to go back a little later, but I missed again, and that time I was in real trouble--with both sides at once. It was just about a thousand years later, when the French and English were fighting each other. Q. You seem to have made a rather dismaying number of mistakes. A. I would never have learned anything if I had been afraid of making mistakes. Anyway, the bishops were the ones I had to fear the most, and when they started questioning me, I-- Q. Was it they who told you about the Saxons being invited to come in? A. No, indeed. By that time, scarcely anyone knew anything any more, except prayers, recipes and how to supposedly cure warts. Later on, there was a revival and everyone became very clever, but I was in Italy at the time and I never got to hear about the Saxons until long afterward--my last trip but two, in fact. I was at a school in England.... * * * * * The headmistress of St Agatha's prided herself on being fair. Her way of being fair was to avoid favoritism by being equally unfair to all the girls and to those of the assistant teachers who would stand for it. Some of them didn't, and they usually left after their first term, as the headmistress didn't believe in contracts. Besides, at the beginning of the twentieth century, contracts for teachers were a novelty.