“Oh, that’s a story written upon Watts’s old hymn,” exclaimed No. 3, contemptuously:—
“‘For Satan finds some mischief still,
For idle hands to do.’
Judy! I call that a regular ‘sell.’”
“Not a bit of it,” cried Aunt Judy, warmly; “I don’t suppose the man who wrote the story ever saw Watts’s hymns, or intended to teach anything half as good. It’s mamma’s moral. She told me she had screwed it out of the story, though she doubted whether it was meant to be there.”
“And what’s the rest of the story then?” inquired No. 3, whose curiosity was aroused.
“Well! when the old Doctor found the world as it was, so ‘slow,’ as you very unmeaningly call it, he took to conjuring and talking with evil spirits by way of amusement; and then they easily persuaded him to be wicked, merely because it gave him something fresh and exciting to do.”
“Watts’s hymn again! I told you so!” exclaimed No. 3. “But the story’s all nonsense from beginning to end. Nobody can conjure, or talk to evil spirits in reality, so the whole thing is impossible; and where you find the moral, I don’t know.”
No. 3 leant back and yawned as he concluded.
He was rather disappointed that nothing more entertaining had come out of the story of Dr. Faustus.
But Aunt Judy had by no means done.