No-Man's-Land for us.
We were speaking of eponyms."

"Yes," said Theron; "it is very interesting."

"There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn't been worked out
much," continued the priest. "Probably the Germans will get at that too,
sometime. They are doing the best Irish work in other fields, as it is.
I spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the
Hittites. Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends
and traditions than any other nation west of Athens; and you find in
their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders
called Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively
modern--about the time of Solomon's Temple. But these independent Irish
myths go back to the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an
ancestor, grandson of Japhet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe
to him the invention of the alphabet. They took their ancient name of
Feine, the modern Fenian, from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which
the Romans knew the Phoenicians by, and to them also is ascribed the
invention of the alphabet. The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge,
just like the Chaldean man-fish. The Druids' tree-worship is identical
with that of the Chaldeans--those pagan groves, you know, which the Jews
were always being punished for building. You see, there is nothing new.
Everything is built on the ruins of something else. Just as the material
earth is made up of countless billions of dead men's bones, so the
mental world is all alive with the ghosts of dead men's thoughts and
beliefs, the wraiths of dead races' faiths and imaginings."

Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye: "That
peroration is from an old sermon of mine, in the days when I used to
preach. I remember rather liking it, at the time."

"But you still preach?" asked the Rev. Mr. Ware, with lifted brows.

"No! no more! I only talk now and again," answered the priest, with what
seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste to take the conversation
back again. "The names of these dead-and-gone things are singularly
pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely. Take the modern name
Marmaduke, for example. It strikes one as peculiarly modern, up-to-date,
doesn't it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth--thousands of years
older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean Meridug, or Merodach. He was
the young god who interceded continually between the angry, omn