"And yet you were cut out for a farmer," thought Vesper, as he surveyed Agapit's sturdy frame. "I suppose you have the details of the expulsion at your fingers' ends," he said, aloud.
"Ah, the expulsion," muttered Agapit, turning deathly pale, "the abominable, damnable expulsion!"
"Your feelings run high on the subject," murmured Vesper.
"It suffocates me, it chokes me, when I reflect how it was brought about. You know, of course, that in the eighteenth century there flourished a devil,—no, not a devil," contemptuously. "What is that for a word? Devil, devil,—it is so common that there is no badness in it. Even the women say, 'Poor devil, I pity him.' Say, rather, there was a god of infamy, the blackest, the basest, the most infernal of created beings that our Lord ever permitted to pollute this earth—"
For a minute he became incoherent, then he caught his breath. "This demon, this arch-fiend, the misbegotten Lawrence that your historian Parkman sets himself to whitewash—"
"I know of Parkman," said Vesper, coldly, "he was once a neighbor of ours."
"Was he!" exclaimed Agapit, in a paroxysm of excitement. "A fine neighbor, a worthy man! Parkman,—the New England story-teller, the traducer, who was too careless to set himself to the task of investigating records."
Vesper was not prepared to hear any abuse of his countryman, and, turning on his heel, he left the room, while Agapit, furious to think that, unasked, he had been betrayed into furnishing a newspaper correspondent with some crumbs of information that might possibly be dished up in appetizing form for the delectation of American readers, slammed the door behind him, and went back to his writing.