Unknowingly, I had struck a chord. The old man blinked belligerently through his senile tears.
“’Tis time,” he said, “that the liars be doin’ justice to somebody. Yer historians are no more than a pack of old women gabblin’ at a wake. A finer man than the Imperor Nero niver wore sandals. Man, I was at the burnin’ of Rome. I knowed the Imperor well, for in them days I was a well-known char-acter. In thim days they had rayspect for a man that lived forever.
“But ’twas of the Imperor Nero I was goin’ to tell ye. I struck into Rome, up the Appian Way, on the night of July the 16th, the year 64. I had just stepped down by way of Siberia and Afghanistan; and one foot of me had a frost-bite, and the other a blister burned by the sand of the desert; and I was feelin’ a bit blue from doin’ patrol duty from the North Pole down to the Last Chance corner in Patagonia, and bein’ miscalled a Jew in the bargain. Well, I’m tellin’ ye I was passin’ the Circus Maximus, and it was dark as pitch over the way, and then I heard somebody sing out, ‘Is that you, Michob?’
“Over ag’inst the wall, hid out amongst a pile of barrels and old dry-goods boxes, was the Imperor Nero wid his togy wrapped around his toes, smokin’ a long, black segar.
“‘Have one, Michob?’ says he.
“‘None of the weeds for me,’ says I—‘nayther pipe nor segar. What’s the use,’ says I, ‘of smokin’ when ye’ve not got the ghost of a chance of killin’ yeself by doin’ it?’
“‘True for ye, Michob Ader, my perpetual Jew,’ says the Imperor; ‘ye’re not always wandering. Sure, ’tis danger gives the spice of our pleasures—next to their bein’ forbidden.’
“‘And for what,’ says I, ‘do ye smoke be night in dark places widout even a cinturion in plain clothes to attend ye?’
“‘Have ye ever heard, Michob,’ says the Imperor, ‘of predestinarianism?’
“‘I’ve had the cousin of it,’ says I. ‘I’ve been on the trot with pedestrianism for many a year, and more to come, as ye well know.’