The three Elders would sit leaning forward, watching the changes of fortune and event that went on from hour to hour by the Mediterranean. The captain smoked his pipe; the minister rested his chin on his cane; the miller's hands were on his knees, his large white face stolid, his heavy lips seldom moving. He was a thinking man, the miller,—a slow-moving, slow-speaking, persistent man, and a fatalist in his way of thinking, though he used no such term; it was his notion of things.
They talked of old history out of Gibbon and Grote and the Seven Monarchies, and they talked of things that had happened to them as men in the world; but the things which they thought of most often, in watching the children and the Mill Stream, they said little about, for these had not happened a thousand or two thousand years before, nor twenty or thirty, but just sixty or seventy. And this was why they came so often to the Elders' Seat, because something dim and happy seemed to come up to them, like a mist, from the Mill Stream, where the children quarrelled and contrived.
“I'll tell ye what ailed Rome,” said Captain David. “She needed to be keeled and scraped. She fouled her bottom!”
The minister answered slowly: “No, she was rotten within. She lost the faith in God and in man that keeps a people sound.”
“Ho! Well, then she wa'n't handled right.”
The miller rubbed his thumb slowly on the palm of his hand. “She was grinded out,” he said. “She couldn't help it. Corn can't keep itself from meal when the stones gets at it. No more a man can't keep his bones from dust, nor a people, either, I'm thinking, when its time comes.”
The minister shook his head. “I don't like that.”
“I don't know as I do, either. And I don't know as that makes any difference.”
“Ho!” said the captain. “Bobby's got a new frog!”
And Chub Leroy cried out in despair: “Look out, Bobby! You're stepping on the Colosseum!”