"OUR BENIGHTED ANCESTORS";
Or, How it will Strike Posterity.
(Circa 2894 A.D.)
Amanda (looking over Amandus's shoulder). What are you so absorbed in, my dear?
Amandus (rousing himself). Why darling, in this very clever, though painful, antiquarian work by Dr. Digemup called "Dips into the Dismal Ages." (Shudders sympathetically.) Dear, dear, how it makes one pity one's poor, respectable, but ridiculous ancestors of about a thousand years syne,—say the end of the "so-called Nineteenth Century!"
Amanda. Why dear, what did they do?
Amandus. You should rather ask, what did they suffer? I was reading a graphic, but harrowing, account of an extraordinary annual "Custom" they had—they, the conventional, commonplace, conformists of the day, top-hatted Philistines, "civilised" into characterlessness, polished into pithlessness, humanised into moral pap and pulp. It seems to have been a custom almost as cruel as the blood-bath of Dahomey, as irrational and tormenting as the hari-kari of old Japan.
Amanda. Dear me! Poor dear deluded duffers, why did they do it?
Amandus. That even the pundits of the "Shrimpton-on-Sea" Exploration Society cannot so much as conjecture. Their excavators lately came upon a most mysterious "marine deposit" in a sand-choked chalk-cave in the course of repairing the great South-Coast Marine Embankment. Here are pictures of some of the items. Many of them are mysteries whose nature and use cannot be fathomed. Here is an apparatus supposed to have been a barbarous musical instrument, a hoop with a piece of parchment stretched across it, and ornamented with movable brazen discs. It may have been used to scare gulls. At any rate, it must have made a hideous din when beaten or agitated. It was discovered near certain strange semi-polished fragments of what were apparently the rib-bones of some extinct animals. Their use now cannot even be surmised; neither can that of a curious wooden implement somewhat resembling a miniature model of the obsolete agricultural implement once known, it appears, as a "shovel" or "spade."
Amanda. How very odd! Still, hardly dreadful, dear, so far, eh?