"Yes. There are a great many sorts, David can tell you. Bricks are a very old institution. I was studying about Chaldaean bricks lately. They were a foot square and two or three inches thick; and if they were not well baked they would not stand much, you know."
"What nonsense you are talking!" said Judith scornfully.
"Some of those bricks were not nonsense, for they have lasted four thousand years. That's what I call—a brick!"
"You wouldn't know it if you saw it though," David remarked.
"You shut up!" said Norton. "Some of your ancestors made them for Nebuchadnezzar."
"Some of my ancestors were over the whole province of Babylon," said David. "But that was not four thousand years ago."
"When I get back as far as Nebuchadnezzar," said Norton shutting his eyes, as if in the effort at abstraction, "I have got as far as I can go. The stars of history beyond that seem to me all at one distance."
"They do not seem so to me," said David. "It was long before Nebuchadnezzar that Solomon reigned; and the Jews were an old people then."
"I know!" said Norton. "Nothing can match you but the Celestials. After all, Noah's three sons all came out of the ark together."
"But the nations of Ham are all gone," said David; "and the nations of Japhet are all changing."