Chapter 6

"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."

[Illustration: "'READING THE SUNDAY NEWSPAPERS'"]

"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