“You are merry, sir. But you have a little looked into St. Augustine I suppose.”
“St. Augustine on Original Sin is my text book. But you, I ask again, where do you find time or inclination for these out-of-the-way speculations? In fact, your whole talk, the more I think of it, is altogether unexampled and extraordinary.”
“Respected sir, have I not already informed you that the quite new method, the strictly philosophical one, on which our office is founded, has led me and my associates to an enlarged study of mankind. It was my fault, if I did not, likewise, hint, that these studies directed always to the scientific procuring of good servants of all sorts, boys included, for the kind gentlemen, our patrons—that these studies, I say, have been conducted equally among all books of all libraries, as among all men of all nations. Then, you rather like St. Augustine, sir?”
“Excellent genius!”
“In some points he was; yet, how comes it that under his own hand, St. Augustine confesses that, until his thirtieth year, he was a very sad dog?”
“A saint a sad dog?”
“Not the saint, but the saint’s irresponsible little forerunner—the boy.”
“All boys are rascals, and so are all men,” again flying off at his tangent; “my name is Pitch; I stick to what I say.”
“Ah, sir, permit me—when I behold you on this mild summer’s eve, thus eccentrically clothed in the skins of wild beasts, I cannot but conclude that the equally grim and unsuitable habit of your mind is likewise but an eccentric assumption, having no basis in your genuine soul, no more than in nature herself.”
“Well, really, now—really,” fidgeted the bachelor, not unaffected in his conscience by these benign personalities, “really, really, now, I don’t know but that I may have been a little bit too hard upon those five and thirty boys of mine.”