“This William Theobald is the coachman of that odd man, Mr. George Barthe, who went about saying such odd things to the young people,” said George; “and he gave us some curious anecdotes of him, for he attends him to many great houses. At a great house in Derbyshire, he says, Mr. Barthe was fastening a lady’s teeth with gold wire, and as he snipped continually pieces of the wire off, the lady said, ‘Oh! let a cloth be spread on the carpet, or the gold will be lost.’ “‘No,’ said the dentist, ‘it won’t be lost, any of it.’ “‘But it must be lost,’ insisted the lady. “‘No,’ added Mr. Barthe, gravely, ‘I assure thee none of it will be lost. It will all be found in the bill.’ “The lady smiled, and was silent. At the same place, Mr. Barthe went into the servants’ hall, and made the servants very merry with his odd talk. ‘Now,’ said he, ‘why is your master like a penny loaf on the top of your church-steeple?’ They gave it up. ‘Because he is high-bred.’ The servants were very merry. ‘But,’ said the dry Quaker, ‘I know now you are expecting that I should leave you something. Well, I will leave as much money as shall last you till I come again, if you are careful,’ and with that he fillipped a new halfpenny up to the ceiling, where it stuck, to the great astonishment of the servants’ hall. And there it is sticking yet, says our Swedenborgian coachman, and is shown to all the people that come to the house.” “How _could_ he do it!” said Letty. “I don’t know,” said George. “The old man said he did not know himself, but that he saw it done, and has seen it since.” “I had a good deal of talk with that Mr. Ephraim Wire. Some wag said to me, ‘That is the Castleborough Nebuchadnezzar; he lives on grass.’ I have heard him termed an eccentric of the first rank. He certainly has some singular ideas, but there is something in them. In the first place, he wants a reform in the mode of spelling our words, which, he says, is barbarous. They ought to be spelled as they are pronounced. In the second, he refuses to eat meat on principle. He thinks it inhuman to kill animals for food. I bade him recollect that God expressly gave to Noah, and to all men after him, all flesh for food, and that our Saviour eat the paschal lamb. Those, he said, were Jewish customs, and might do for Jews; but we were Christians, and called to fulfil the perfect law of love. I reminded him of the preying of all animals on each other, from the greatest to the least, and that therefore it must be a law of nature, which is a law of God. ‘We are not mere animals,’ he replied, ‘but men and Christians,’ I reminded him that he could not fully carry out this system, that every day he destroyed insects by treading on them, and myriads of living things in water by drinking. ‘That,’ said he, ‘I cannot help, but I spare pain as far as I can.’” “Well,” said Ann, “at least it is very humane and praiseworthy. And so they call him Nebuchadnezzar, because he lives on vegetables.”