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Coffee And Repartee
by
“The same box?” said the Bibliomaniac. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I say,” returned the Idiot. “The same box. All boarding, all eschewing luxuries of necessity, all paying their bills with difficulty, all sparsely clothed; in reality, all keeping Lent the year through. ‘Verily,’ he would say, ‘the Idiot has the best of it, for he is young.'”
And leaving them chewing the cud of reflection, the Idiot departed.
“I thought they were going to land you that time,” said the genial gentleman who occasionally imbibed, later; “but when I heard you use the word ‘sciolism,’ I knew you were all right. Where did you get it?”
“My chief got it off on me at the office the other day. I happened in a mad moment to try to unload some of my original observations on him apropos of my getting to the office two hours late, in which it was my endeavor to prove to him that the truly safe and conservative man was always slow, and so apt to turn up late on occasions. He hopped about the office for a minute or two, and then he informed me that I was an 18-karat sciolist. I didn’t know what he meant, and so I looked it up.”
“And what did he mean?”
“He meant that I took the cake for superficiality, and I guess he was right,” replied the Idiot, with a smile that was not altogether mirthful.
VI
“Good-morning!” said the Idiot, cheerfully, as he entered the dining-room.
To this remark no one but the landlady vouchsafed a reply. “I don’t think it is,” she said, shortly. “It’s raining too hard to be a very good morning.”
“That reminds me,” observed the Idiot, taking his seat and helping himself copiously to the hominy. “A friend of mine on one of the newspapers is preparing an article on the ‘Antiquity of Modern Humor.’ With your kind permission, Mrs. Smithers, I’ll take down your remark and hand it over to Mr. Scribuler as a specimen of the modern antique joke. You may not be aware of the fact, but that jest is to be found in the rare first edition of the Tales of Bobbo, an Italian humorist, who stole everything he wrote from the Greeks.”
“So?” queried the Bibliomaniac. “I never heard of Bobbo, though I had, before the auction sale of my library, a choice copy of the Tales of Poggio, bound in full crushed Levant morocco, with gilt edges, and one or two other Italian Joe Millers in tree calf. I cannot at this moment recall their names.”
“At what period did Bobbo live?” inquired the School-master.
“I don’t exactly remember,” returned the Idiot, assisting the last potato on the table over to his plate. “I don’t know exactly. It was subsequent to B.C., I think, although I may be wrong. If it was not, you may rest assured it was prior to B.C.”
“Do you happen to know,” queried the Bibliomaniac, “the exact date of this rare first edition of which you speak?”
“No; no one knows that,” returned the Idiot. “And for a very good reason. It was printed before dates were invented.”
The silence which followed this bit of information from the Idiot was almost insulting in its intensity. It was a silence that spoke, and what it said was that the Idiot’s idiocy was colossal, and he, accepting the stillness as a tribute, smiled sweetly.
“What do you think, Mr. Whitechoker,” he said, when he thought the time was ripe for renewing the conversation–“what do you think of the doctrine that every day will be Sunday by-and-by?”
“I have only to say, sir,” returned the Dominie, pouring a little hot water into his milk, which was a bit too strong for him, “that I am a firm believer in the occurrence of a period when Sunday will be to all practical purposes perpetual.”
“That is my belief, too,” observed the School-master. “But it will be ruinous to our good landlady to provide us with one of her exceptionally fine Sunday breakfasts every morning.”