ANCIENT GERMAN HOUSES.
Master Lewis had entered the room quietly while the business of the Club was being thus happily and unanimously carried forward. The boys had asked him to be present at the meeting, and to give them his opinions of their plans.
“I think,” he said, “that your choice of a subject for your literary evenings is an excellent one, but I notice a tendency to place more stress on the fine old fictions of Germany and the North than upon actual history. These fictions for the most part grew out of the disturbed consciences of bad men in ignorant and barbarous times. They were shapes of the imagination.”
He continued:—
“Let me prepare your minds a little for a proper estimate of these alluring and entertaining stories.”
MASTER LEWIS ON POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.
The front of Northumberland House, England, used to be ornamented with the bronze statue of a lion, called Percy. A humorist, wishing to produce a sensation, placed himself in front of the building, one day, and, assuming an attitude of astonishment, exclaimed:—
“It wags, it wags!”
His eyes were riveted on the statue, to which the bystanders readily observed that the exclamation referred. Quite a number of persons collected, each one gazing on the bronze figure, expecting to see the phenomenon. Their imagination supplied the desired marvel, and presently a street full of people fancied that they could see the lion Percy wag his tail!
An old distich runs something as follows:—