magazines, get over your astonishment at
finding that _coelum_ and _heaven_ contain the same idea
etymologically, and that there was a large bread-bakery at Skolos,
and make up your mind to believe nothing till you can't help it. You
haven't begun to work yet. Wait till you have lived as I have, forty
years in one house, with your library likely to turn you out of doors,
and only an old black woman to speak to, before you begin to think of
calling yourself a scholar. Eh?"

And at this point the old gentleman adjusted the dipper, which was
merely an ear-trumpet,--though for a moment more mysterious to
Nicholas, in its new capacity, than when he had regarded it as a unique
specimen of a familiar household-implement,--and thrust the bowl toward
the embarrassed youth. In fact, having said all that he intended to say
to his unwelcome supposed disciple, he showed enough churlish grace to
permit him to make such reply or defence as seemed best.

The old gentleman had pulled up so suddenly in his harangue, and called
for an answer so authoritatively, and with such a singular flourish of
his trumpet, that Nicholas, losing command of the studied explanation of
his conduct, which a moment before had been at his tongue's end, caught
at the last sentence spoken, and gained a perilous advantage by
asking,--

"Have you, indeed, lived in this house forty years, Sir?"

"Eh! what?" said the old gentleman, impatiently, perceiving that he had
spoken. "Here, speak into my trumpet. What is the use of a trumpet, if
you don't speak into it?"

"Oh," thought Nicholas to himself, "I see, he is excessively deaf"; and
bending over the trumpet, where he saw a sieve-like frame, as if all
speech were to be strained as it entered, he collected his force, and
repeated the question, with measured and sonorous utterance, "Sir, have
you lived in this house forty years?"

"I just told you so," said the old man, not unnaturally starting back.
"And if you were going to ask me such an unnecessary question at all,"
he added, testily, "you needn't have roared it out at me. I could have
heard that without my trumpet. Yes, I've lived here forty years, and so
has black Maria, who opened the door for you; and I say again that I
have accomplished what I have by uninterrupted study. I haven't gone
about, bowing to every he, she, and it. I never knew who lived in any of
the other houses in the court till to-day, when a woman came and asked
me to go out for the e