Coffee and Repartee | Page 9

on Wall Street, and lost the hundred dollars that were subsequently put to a good use by the uneducated me."
"From which you deduce that ignorance is better than education?" queried the School-master, scornfully.
"For an omniscient," returned the Idiot, "you are singularly near-sighted. I have made no such deduction. I arrive at the conclusion, however, that in the chase for the gilded shekel the education of experience is better than the coddling of Alma Mater. In the satisfaction--the personal satisfaction--one derives from a liberal education, I admit that the sons of Alma Mater are the better off. I never could hope to be so self-satisfied, for instance, as you are."
[Illustration: THE SCHOOL-MASTER AS A COOLER]
"No," observed the School-master, "you cannot raise grapes on a thistle farm. Any unbiassed observer looking around this table," he added, "and noting Mr. Whitechoker, a graduate of Yale; the Bibliomaniac, a son of dear old Harvard; the Doctor, an honor man of Williams; our legal friend here, a graduate of Columbia--to say nothing of myself, who was graduated with honors at Amherst--any unbiassed observer seeing these, I say, and then seeing you, wouldn't take very long to make up his mind as to whether a man is better off or not for having had a collegiate training."
"There I must again dispute your assertion," returned the Idiot. "The unbiassed person of whom you speak would say, 'Here is this gray-haired Amherst man, this book-loving Cambridge boy of fifty-seven years of age, the reverend graduate of Yale, class of '55, and the other two learned gentlemen of forty-nine summers each, and this poor ignoramus of an Idiot, whose only virtue is his modesty, all in the same box.' And then he would ask himself, 'In what way have these sons of Amherst, Yale, Harvard, and so forth, the better of the unassuming Idiot?'"
"The same box?" said the Bibliomaniac. "What do you mean by that?"
"Just what I say," returned the Idiot. "The same box. All boarding, all eschewing luxuries of necessity, all paying their bills with difficulty, all sparsely clothed; in reality, all keeping Lent the year through. 'Verily,' he would say, 'the Idiot has the best of it, for he is young.'"
And leaving them chewing the cud of reflection, the Idiot departed.
"I thought they were going to land you that time," said the genial gentleman who occasionally imbibed, later; "but when I heard you use the word 'sciolism,' I knew you were all right. Where did you get it?"
"My chief got it off on me at the office the other day. I happened in a mad moment to try to unload some of my original observations on him apropos of my getting to the office two hours late, in which it was my endeavor to prove to him that the truly safe and conservative man was always slow, and so apt to turn up late on occasions. He hopped about the office for a minute or two, and then he informed me that I was an 18-karat sciolist. I didn't know what he meant, and so I looked it up."
"And what did he mean?"
"He meant that I took the cake for superficiality, and I guess he was right," replied the Idiot, with a smile that was not altogether mirthful.

VI
"Good-morning!" said the Idiot, cheerfully, as he entered the dining-room.
To this remark no one but the landlady vouchsafed a reply. "I don't think it is," she said, shortly. "It's raining too hard to be a very good morning."
"That reminds me," observed the Idiot, taking his seat and helping himself copiously to the hominy. "A friend of mine on one of the newspapers is preparing an article on the 'Antiquity of Modern Humor.' With your kind permission, Mrs. Smithers, I'll take down your remark and hand it over to Mr. Scribuler as a specimen of the modern antique joke. You may not be aware of the fact, but that jest is to be found in the rare first edition of the Tales of Bobbo, an Italian humorist, who stole everything he wrote from the Greeks."
[Illustration: "'READING THE SUNDAY NEWSPAPERS'"]
"So?" queried the Bibliomaniac. "I never heard of Bobbo, though I had, before the auction sale of my library, a choice copy of the _Tales of Poggio_, bound in full crushed Levant morocco, with gilt edges, and one or two other Italian Joe Millers in tree calf. I cannot at this moment recall their names."
"At what period did Bobbo live?" inquired the School-master.
"I don't exactly remember," returned the Idiot, assisting the last potato on the table over to his plate. "I don't know exactly. It was subsequent to B.C., I think, although I may be wrong. If it was not, you may rest assured it was prior to B.C."
"Do you happen to know," queried the Bibliomaniac, "the exact date of this rare first