“These people evidently made their Gods, for they admit it. I wonder if we made ours?”
Careful Leo!
“What a wonderful city is Eurania! What a wonderful country is Cavitorus! What a wonderful people are the Shadowas!
“But that meeting! The calm dignity of those four hundred Councillors of State was amazing. What marvellous dispassionate interest is taken by the enormous throngs of people, who occupy the main body and galleries of the Temple.
“Proud Oseba! Well may I call thee ‘master.’ Oh! how I wish the appreciative Sir Marmaduke were here.”
Yes, Leo, I would like to have been with you, but, maybe, that would have meant that I would be with you now, out of the cold, poor fellow!
But here the fellow strings it out as though our days were also nineteen hours long, and our lives a thousand years. He keeps us on so high a key, that we begin to wonder what there is in it for him. I will “blue pencil.” For the once impatient Leo Bergin has forgotten, I fear, the customs of this upper world, and that every ear is attuned to the popular rush.
If you’ve something good to say,
Get a move!
If you’d have us go your way,
Get a move!
If it’s goods, fling out your sample,
If religion, show it’s ample,
But—Get a move.
’Pon my word! Leo’s “borrowed lines” inspire me with a poetic vein. But Leo is becoming as tedious as an Australian drought, a West Coast “wet spell,” or a debate on a “no-confidence motion,” so I shall here draw my critical pencil through many lines. Leo Bergin is clearness itself, and from his language there flows, to the intelligent brain, a true conception of the situation; but for the sake of brevity—from vanity, maybe—I shall condense, in my own language.