“That’s what you get, Hester,” said Cornelius, pulling her up like a horse that stumbled, “by your star gazing. You are always coming to grief by looking higher than your head!” He was always ready to criticize, and it was so much the easier for him that he had not the least inclination toward self-criticism.

“Oh, please stop a minute, Corney,” returned Hester, for he continued to walk on as if nothing had happened. “My ankle hurts!”

“I didn’t know it was that bad,” he answered stopping. “There, take my arm.”

After a few moments she said, “Now I can go on again. How stupid of me—on plain asphalt pavement!”

They walked on, but within minutes Hester stopped again.

“Corney,” she said, “my ankle feels so weak I am afraid I will twist it again.”

“Just my luck,” rejoined her brother. “I thought we were going to have some fun!”

They stood silent—she looking nowhere in particular, and he staring about in all directions.

“What’s this?” he cried, fixing his gaze on a large building opposite them. “The Pilgrim’s Progress, it says on the board. It must be a lecture. Let’s go in and see! We may at least sit there till your ankle is better. Admission—sixpence. Come along. We may get a good laugh, who knows?”

“I don’t mind,” Hester said as they crossed the road.

It was a large, dingy, dirty, water-stained and somewhat dilapidated hall to which the stone stair, ascending immediately from the door, led them. Some twenty-five or thirty people formed the company present in the gloomy place. An old man, like a broken-down clergyman, wearing a dirty white neckcloth, kept walking up and down the platform, flaunting a pretence of lecture on Bunyan’s allegory. Whether he was a little drunk or greatly in his dotage, it was impossible to determine. A sample of his mode of lecturing will reveal that a few lingering rags of scholastic achievement yet fluttered about the poor fellow.

“And then came the terrible battle between Christian—or was it Faithful?—I used to know, but trouble has played old hookey with my memory. It’s all here, you know”—and he tapped his bald head—”but there’s Christian and Apollyon. When I was young, and that wasn’t yesterday, I used to think, but that was before I could read, that Apollyon was one and the same with Bonaparty—Nappoleon, you know. And I wasn’t just so far wrong neither, as I shall readily prove to those of my distinguished audience who have been to college like myself, and learned to read Greek like their mother tongue. For what is the very name Apollyon but a prophecy concerning the great conqueror of Europe! Nothing can be plainer. N stands for nothing—a mere veil to cover the prophecy till the time of revealing. In all languages it is the sign of negation—no, and none, and never, and nothing. Therefore cast it away as the nothing it is. Then what have you left but apoleon! Throw away another letter, and what have you but poleon! Throw away letter after letter, and what do you get but words—Napoleon, apoleon, poleon, oleon, leon, eon, or, if you like, on! Now these are all Greek words—and what, pray, do they mean? I will give you a literal translation, and I challenge any Greek scholar who may be here present to set me right, that is, to show me wrong: Napoleon the destroyer of cities, being a destroying lion! Now I should like to know a more sure word of prophecy than that! Would any one in the company oblige me? I take that now for an incontrovertible”—he stammered over the word—“proof of the truth of the Bible. But I am wandering from my subject, which error, I pray you, ladies and gentlemen, to excuse me.”