fcearson's Xane 



time and season. On every side we were sur- 

 rounded by such ruins, and the pleasure of recon- 

 struction was ours. Here, for once, the imagina- 

 tion had full swing, and how we reveled ! What 

 we did not know we fancied, and what we fancied 

 we fell in love with. This is the proper business 

 of loitering. Bent upon our own amusement 

 only, our aimless method was not a loss of oppor- 

 tunity, and we were acquiring as much truth as 

 does the professional historian by his scientific 

 procedure. Does he not sometimes go astray al- 

 most as much as the woman who said she did not 

 believe her folks ever cleaned flax with such a ma- 

 chine, looking, at the time, at the skeleton of a 

 spinet? But the mathematician to-day made a 

 bad break. Pointing, as he spoke, to a churn 

 upon its cross-legged stand, he said, " That 's bet- 

 ter than putting your barrel of wine on the cellar 

 floor and having to stoop over to draw the 

 liquor." 



" That 's a churn, man," I replied. 



" A churn ? You were speaking of history ; let 

 me say that the distance between it and the truth 

 of the matter is like that with which we deal in 

 astronomy." 



That was a neat remark, too good for a mathe- 

 matician, and I told him so. 



" They laid out their paths more with reference 

 to convenience than to the garden landscape," my 

 companion remarked. " See that crooked line in 

 188 



