The parson was an odd match to his books. His conversation was as musty, learned and interminable as themselves. He talked of all topics but those that could have been of the least interest to anybody. He never thought to ask who we were, or what business had brought us thither, but having lured us into his library, he very vigorously began to engage us with matters at least a thousand years old. We were very polite at first, and nodded our heads in deep interest at the mention of the first Punic war, and kept saying, "Ah, to be sure!" and inserting "yes" and "oh yes" whenever we found half a chance to get in so much in the middle of some animadversions he thought fit to make on the behaviour of the Carthaginians generally. But when proceeding to move with an air of great mystery and consequence to topics of the most inconsequent character, and presently to prove to us that in his opinion the battle of Cannæ, or it may have been Marathon, or the siege of Troy for aught we knew or cared, was not so important and decisive an affair as the historians of these times had represented, our observance of a polite interest showed signs of giving out. We might shuffle, however, and shift our stations, and cough, and take our weight off our right leg and lean it on our left, but it never made one bit of difference to this terrible monologue. The old parson, with his eyes half closed and his hands spread forth, poured out the finest prose in his mellifluous voice, with every period rounded to such a perfection that had he been a historian and his speech a printed page the world could never have sufficiently admired his attainments. And every emphasis and quantity seemed so indubitably exact in the classical tongues he so freely quoted, as must have made him the envy of pedagogues and the paragon among them all. And all this time we were striving to maintain our well-bred interest as best we might, and inwardly cursed Rome and Greece and the whole race of poets, historians and soldiers that ever sprang from them.