, and the origin of things, the boys who did not then belong to
the Examiner Club, say Fox and Clarke and Furness and Waldo Emerson,
thumbed their Greek Readers in "Boston as it was," and learned the truth
about Sybaris! A long, narrow room, I say, whose walls, when I knew them
first, were of that tawny orange wash which is appropriated to kitchens.
But by a master stroke of Mr. Dillaway's these walls were made lilac or
purple one summer vacation. We sat, to recite, on long settees,
pea-green in color, which would teeter slightly on the well-worn floor.
There, for an hour daily, while brighter boys than I recited, I sat an
hour musing, looking at the immense Jacobs's Greek Reader, and waiting
my turn to come. If you did not look off your book much, no harm came to
you. So, in the hour, you got fifty-three minutes and a few odd seconds
of day-dream, for six minutes and two thirds of reciting, unless, which
was unusual, some fellow above you broke down, and a question passed
along of a sudden recalled you to modern life. I have been sitting on
that old green settee, and at the same time riding on horseback in
Virginia, through an open wooded country, with one of Lord Fairfax's
grandsons and two pretty cousins of his, and a fallow deer has just
appeared in the distance, when, by the failure of Hutchinson or Wheeler,
just above me, poor Mr. Dillaway has had to ask me, "Ingham, what verbs
omit the reduplication?" Talk of war! Where is versatility, otherwise
called presence of mind, so needed as in recitation at a public school?

Well, there, I say, I made acquaintance with Sybaris. Nay, strictly
speaking, my first visits to Sybaris were made there and then. What the
Greek Reader tells of Sybaris is in three or four anecdotes, woven into
that strange, incoherent patchwork of "Geography." In that place are
patched together a statement of Strabo and one of Athenaeus about two
things in Sybaris which may have belonged some eight hundred years
apart. But what of that to a school-boy! Will your descendants, dear
reader, in the year 3579 A. D., be much troubled, if, in the English
Reader of their day, Queen Victoria shall be made to drink Spartan black
broth with William the Conqueror out of a conch-shell in New Zealand?

With regard to Sybaris, then, the old Jacobs's Greek Reader tells the
following stories: "The Sybarites were distinguished for luxury. They
did not permit the trades which made a loud noise, such as those of
brass