“Say sometimes; then thou’lt be like the stopped horologue, telling the true time once in twenty-four hours, at least.”
“Thy poetry runs into caustic quality. What hast thou been lunching on since morn?”
“At least not on Dead Sea apples, fair without, ashes within. My poetry, if I have any, always sings in accord with the company it keeps.”
“How many more arrows in thy quiver, hast thou?”
“Only one, and that a question; does my master intend to foreswear marriage himself? He ridicules it.”
“I have already done so.”
“Well, ’tis well thou didst not live in Rome, for its citizens that dared to live amid the temptations and soul-crampings of voluntary bachelorhood were highly taxed for their disregard of the claims of society and the state.”
“Yet even the Romans ever deemed bachelorhood a blessing. In this opinion royal Claudius decreed that the sailors who brought to Rome a ship loaded from the wheat granaries of Egypt in the time of Agabus’s famine, should be as a reward permitted to remain unmarried. If I were a Roman and a sailor I’d pray for a famine and a Claudius.”
“A world without wives? What a world!”
So saying Ichabod caught up a stick and began marking on the earth.