“I beg your pardon for interrupting you, but can you inform me, etc., etc.?”
The student raised his head, and looked at us with lacklustre or abstracted eyes.
“Hey?”
Caput repeated the query distinctly and with emphasis.
“Chawles the First?”
“Yes!” less patiently. “The king whose head was cut off by order of Cromwell’s parliament, under the windows of Whitehall, in 1649?”
“Never heard of him!” rejoined the countryman of Hume, Macaulay, and Froude, resuming his studies.
Caput recoiled as from an electric eel. “I wouldn’t have believed it, had any one else heard and repeated it to me!” gasped he, when out of ear-shot. “Do you suppose there is a hod-carrier in Boston who does not know the history of Faneuil Hall?”
“Hundreds! Hod-carriers are usually of foreign birth.”
“Or a school-boy in America who never heard of Arnold’s treason and André’s fate? Or, for that matter, who cannot, when twelve years old, tell the whole story of King Charles’s death, even to the ‘Remember!’ as he laid his head upon the block?”