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, and the origin of things, the boys who did not then belong to the Examiner Club, say Fox and Clarke and Furness and Waldo Emerson, thumbed their Greek Readers in "Boston as it was," and learned the truth about Sybaris! A long, narrow room, I say, whose walls, when I knew them first, were of that tawny orange wash which is appropriated to kitchens. But by a master stroke of Mr. Dillaway's these walls were made lilac or purple one summer vacation. We sat, to recite, on long settees, pea-green in color, which would teeter slightly on the well-worn floor. There, for an hour daily, while brighter boys than I recited, I sat an hour musing, looking at the immense Jacobs's Greek Reader, and waiting my turn to come. If you did not look off your book much, no harm came to you. So, in the hour, you got fifty-three minutes and a few odd seconds of day-dream, for six minutes and two thirds of reciting, unless, which was unusual, some fellow above you broke down, and a question passed along of a sudden recalled you to modern life. I have been sitting on that old green settee, and at the same time riding on horseback in Virginia, through an open wooded country, with one of Lord Fairfax's grandsons and two pretty cousins of his, and a fallow deer has just appeared in the distance, when, by the failure of Hutchinson or Wheeler, just above me, poor Mr. Dillaway has had to ask me, "Ingham, what verbs omit the reduplication?" Talk of war! Where is versatility, otherwise called presence of mind, so needed as in recitation at a public school? Well, there, I say, I made acquaintance with Sybaris. Nay, strictly speaking, my first visits to Sybaris were made there and then. What the Greek Reader tells of Sybaris is in three or four anecdotes, woven into that strange, incoherent patchwork of "Geography." In that place are patched together a statement of Strabo and one of Athenaeus about two things in Sybaris which may have belonged some eight hundred years apart. But what of that to a school-boy! Will your descendants, dear reader, in the year 3579 A. D., be much troubled, if, in the English Reader of their day, Queen Victoria shall be made to drink Spartan black broth with William the Conqueror out of a conch-shell in New Zealand? With regard to Sybaris, then, the old Jacobs's Greek Reader tells the following stories: "The Sybarites were distinguished for luxury. They did not permit the trades which made a loud noise, such as those of brass
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