Heaven — bah! nobody ever thought of
sunshine, or moonlight, or blue deep waves
curling up and along golden sand who listen
to Mr. M'Ritchie. I doubt whether these
natural phenomena would have had the
courage to exhibit themselves in his
presence; so no wonder nobody spoke of
them. We spoke of corn and tallow, of lead
and guano; and the curious thing was, that
he was a perfect miracle of information.
There was not a spot on the face of the earth
he did not know the shape of, and the size of
its market, and the whole of its history, and
what was the rate of exchange established
in its bourse. In short he was Haydn's
Dates, and Maunder's Treasury of
Knowledge, and Murray's Guide Books, and
M'Culloch's Dictionary all in one. And
I—only think of the difference—knew the
hero of every novel for twenty years, believed
in Gulliver's Travels, and could say the
Arabian Nights by heart. Of course
being so entirely opposite we took a fancy to
each other. I asked him to tea.

My domestic peace was gone from that
hour! The wife I was so fond of, my Dora,
my tiddly toddly, my wippity pippity, she
never cared for me any more! All my
little enjoyments, my dips into Shakespeare,
my flights with Peter Wilkins, my courtships
with the glums and glowries, she
hated and despised. She cared for facts,
facts only; the broader, the bolder, the
stupider the better. And there opposite
that fairy creature sat the gaunt form
of M'Ritchie, ejecting huge, deformed,
repulsive, coagulated realities, with the force
and pertinacity of a twenty-four pounder,
and shutting his mouth after the operation
with the slam of a prison-door. She
respected the wretch! he was so exact, so
reliable, and knew so much! Did I say
he was a Scotchman? But if you had
heard him cough, you would have known
that those lungs had been filled with mountain
winds and alcohol from their earliest
years. His breath was Scotch, his walk was
Scotch. He would have done for sentry at a
tobacconist's shop; his language was strong,
firm, grammatical, trenchant, and to the
point; but with a tone; with a pragmatical
conceit; with a pitiless precision, and
regardlessness of other people s thoughts and
feelings ugh! I think I hear still the remorseless
"I big yer par-r-don" with which he
solemnly prefaced his demolition of all your
statements and rectification of all your errors;
your favourite statements, your fondly
cherished errors! What was to be done?
The man was always right. Your statements
were evidently unfounded, your errors
ridiculously clear. You had made them for
twenty years, you had believed in them from
childhood. But, he wouldn't let you quote
from the poets anything whatever that wasn't
as true and undeniable as the income-tax.
If you said Henry the Fifth was a gallant
fellow who talked of taking Prester John by
the beard, M'Ritchie rolled the vast denial
in his jaws, and propelled it with the vigour
of a catapult, " I big yer par-r-don, Henry the
Fift was wrang: there niver was a Prester
John; " and, when the big lips jerked
themselves together again with a triumphant
crack, you felt that Prester John, beard and
all, was buried in that impenetrable grave,
never to rise again.

Why should I go through the miserable list
of all the cherished beliefs he scattered into
air? Did Remus never jump over a wall?
did Curtius never leap into a gulf? nor
Mademoiselle Rachel never blow up that
bandy-legged little Horatius in the colourless
kilt? The Sabines: was there no forcible
abduction to Gretna Green? Regulus: was
there no surrender on his own recognisance?
And farther down in history, was there no
Rosamond's Bower? No generous St. Pierre
and the citizens of Calais receiving their
pardon from the harsh-voiced king at the
intercession of the sweet Philippa? Were
all to be overthrown by that gigantic image
of iconoclasm sitting starched and cold on the
cosiest side of my fire-place, gazed on, open-
lipped, by the once all-believing, but now
utterly incredulous, sceptic, sneering, proof-
exacting little girl who despised Dora and
began mathematics, amusing herself in her
gayest moments with a page or two of the
statistics of crime or corn? I hated the man. He
did not look like a person of eighteen
hundred and fifty-six, but a skeleton of some
dreadful and extinct pre-Adamite animal. Vastity
of jaw, breadth of countenance, boniness of
structure— who could he be but the resuscitated
body (and possibly mind too) of one of
the antediluvian monsters on that melancholy
island in the Crystal Palace garden,— the
iguanodon, or mastodon; or, more likely still,
the megatherium, of which, I believe, the
name means in English the great beast? He
was undoubtedly an English, or rather
Scottish megatherium, and committed such
devastations in the forests of history and
romance, that, if long continued, not a green
leaf would be left. Was there indeed no
St. Pierre and the self-sacrificing six, as
honourable in my eyes as the three hundred
Fabii (who never existed) or Codrus of Athens
(who also is a mere imposition).

"I big yer par-r-don," he began; and before
the flop of his closing jaws it was clear that
the pretty story of that Calais surrender was
an invention of after days; for he pulled out
—other people would have put a hand in
their pocket for this purpose, and laid a
volume on the table, but he merely opened a
drawer in his inexhaustible memory, and
pulled out— a work written by an eye-witness,
in which from hour to hour the course of the
siege is detailed, and no mention made of
what, to a citizen, would have been the most
interesting part of the story,— no summoning
of the inhabitants,— no procession with ropes