“Whence could they have got it?”
“Why, perhaps where they got their names, brother. A gentleman, who had travelled much, once told me that he had seen the sister of it about the neck of an Indian queen.”
“Some of your names, Jasper, appear to be church names; your own, for example, and Ambrose, and Sylvester; perhaps you got them from the Papists, in the times of Popery; but where did you get such a name as Piramus, a name of Grecian romance? Then some of them appear to be Slavonian; for example, Mikailia and Pakomovna. I don’t know much of Slavonian; but—”
“What is Slavonian, brother?”
“The family name of certain nations, the principal of which is the Russian, and from which the word slave is originally derived. You have heard of the Russians, Jasper?”
“Yes, brother; and seen some. I saw their crallis at the time of the peace; he was not a bad-looking man for a Russian.”
“By the bye, Jasper, I’m half inclined to think that crallis is a Slavish word. I saw something like it in a lil called ‘Voltaire’s Life of Charles.’ How you should have come by such names and words is to me incomprehensible.”
“You seem posed, brother.”
“I really know very little about you, Jasper.”
“Very little indeed, brother. We know very little about ourselves; and you know nothing, save what we have told you; and we have now and then told you things about us which are not exactly true, simply to make a fool of you, brother. You will say that was wrong; perhaps it was. Well, Sunday will be here in a day or two, when we will go to church, where possibly we shall hear a sermon on the disastrous consequences of lying.”