"I noticed the intention," said poppa. "It's down in the guide-book that you've been 'absolved from the vow of silence'—is that correct?"
"Right you are," said Brother Eusebius. "What about it?"
"Oh, nothing—only it explains a good deal. I guess you enjoy it, don't you?"
But Brother Eusebius was bending over a cell in better preservation than most of them, and was illuminating with his candle the bones of the dweller in it. The light flickered on the skull of the Early Christian and the tonsure of the modern one and made comparisons. It also cut the darkness into solid blocks, and showed us broken bits of marble, faint stains of old frescoes, strange rough letters, and where it wavered furthest the uncertain lines of a graven cross.
"Here's one of the original inhabitants," remarked Eusebius. "He's been here all the time. I hope the ladies don't mind looking at him in his bones?"
"Thee, you can pick him up," said old Demetrius, handing a thigh-bone to momma, who shrank from the privilege. "It ith quite dry."
"It seems such a liberty," she said, "and he looks so incomplete without it. Do put it back."
"That's the way I feel," remarked Dicky, "but I don't believe he'd mind our looking at a toe-bone. Are his toe-bones all there?"
"No," replied Demetrius, "I have count another day and he ith nine only. Here ith a few."
"It is certainly a very solemn and unusual privilege," remarked Mr. Mafferton, as the toe-bones went round, "to touch the mortal remnant of an Early Christian."