“Yes. Mine was the best that any one ever had. He was a minister of the Kirk—that is, he would have been, but he died.”
“In Scotland?”
“No—at Pau, in the Pyrenees.”
“Were you with him?”
“I was not.”
This seemed a remembrance so acutely painful, that shortly afterwards I tried to change the subject, by asking a question or two about himself,—and especially what I had long wanted to find out—how he came by that eccentric Christian-name.
“Is it eccentric?—I really never knew or thought after whom I was called.”
I suggested, Max Piccolomini.
“Who was he, pray? My improfessional reading has been small. I am ashamed to say I never heard of Max Piccolomini.” Amused by this naive confession of ignorance, I offered jestingly to give him a course of polite literature, and begin with that grandest of German dramas, Schiller's Wallenstein.
“Not in German, if you please; I don't know a dozen words of the language.”