“Then I will fling it into the river.”
“Don’t do that; here, give it me. Now what shall I do with it? you were so fond of it.”
“I am so no longer.”
“But how will you pass your time; what will you read?”
“I wish I had never learned to read, or, if I had, that I had only read the books I saw at school: the primer or the other.”
“What was the other?”
“I think they called it the Bible: all about God, and Job, and Jesus.”
“Ah, I know it.”
“You have read it; it is a nice book—all true?”
“True, true—I don’t know what to say; but if the world be true, and not a lie, a fiction, I don’t see why the Bible, as they call it, should not be true. By-the-bye, what do you call Bible in your tongue, or, indeed, book of any kind? as Bible merely means a book.”