"Here you behold the terrible battle between Christian--or was it Faithful?--I used to know, but trouble has played old Hookey with my memory. It's all here, you know"--and he tapped the bald table-land of his head--"but somehow it ain't handy as it used! In the morning it flourisheth and groweth up: in the evening it is cut down and withereth. Man that is in honor and abideth not, is like the beast that perisheth--but there's Christian and Apollyon, right afore you, and better him than me. When I was a young one, and that wasn't yesterday, I used to think, but that was before I could read, that Apollyon was one and the same with Bonaparty--Nappoleon, you know. And I wasn't just so far wrong neither, as I shall readily prove to those of my distinguished audience who have been to college like myself, and learned to read Greek like their mother tongue. For what is the very name Apollyon, but an occult prophecy concerning the great conqueror of Europe! nothing can be plainer! Of course the first letter, N, stands for nothing--a mere veil to cover the prophecy till the time of revealing. In all languages it is the sign of negation--_no_, and _none_, and _never_, and _nothing_; therefore cast it away as the nothing it is. Then what have you left but _apoleon_! Throw away another letter, and what have you but _poleon_! Throw away letter after letter, and what do you get but words--_Napoleon, apoleon, poleon, oleon, leon, eon_, or, if you like, _on_! Now these are all Greek words--and what, pray, do they mean? I will give you a literal translation, and I challenge any Greek scholar who may be here present to set me right, that is, to show me wrong: Napoleon the destroyer of cities, being a destroying lion! Now I should like to know a more sure word of prophecy than that! Would any one in the company oblige me? I take that now for an incontrovertible"--he stammered over this word--"proof of the truth of the Bible. But I am wandering from my subject, which error, I pray you, ladies and gentlemen, to excuse, for I am no longer what I was in the prime of youth's rosy morn--come, I must get on! Change the slide, boy; I'm sick of it. I'm sick of it all. I want to get home and go to bed." He maundered on in this way, uttering even worse nonsense than I have set down, and mingling with it soiled and dusty commonplaces of religion, every now and then dwelling for a moment or two upon his own mental and physical declension from the admirable being he once was. He reached the height of his absurdity in describing the resistance of the two pilgrims to the manifold temptations of Vanity Fair, which he so set forth as to take from Christian and Faithful the smallest possible appearance of merit in turning their backs upon them.