d as any Polymatherses iver was in it--ivery hair."

The stranger's patronymic having thus been ascertained, it was desirable
to fix his calling, and, despite his disclaimer of inherited erudition,
several circumstances bespoke him a schoolmaster, even before the
question seemed settled by the first act of his convalescence being an
inquiry into the amount of book-learning which Dan and Nicholas had
amassed during their sixteen and fourteen years. This was not large,
though as much as could be expected, considering that in all Lisconnel
there were not just then, I believe, more than four volumes, one of
which being merely the index to a non-existent _Encyclopaedia_, can
scarcely rank as literature. The boys themselves, and their grandfather,
were deeply interested in the examination, and very anxious that it
should have a creditable result. For learning and the learned have at
all times been held in profound respect among us away on our bogland,
where the devotion to something afar springs perhaps the more abundantly
because so many things are remote. On this occasion Mr. Polymathers
opened his most sizable bundle, and it was seen to be filled with books,
not fewer, doubtless, than a score, in leather bindings, ragged and
battered, and brownly time-stained all over their margins, as if the
river of years had for them run no metaphor, but a russet bog-stream.
They comprised _Homer_, _Virgil_, _Livy_, and other ancients; likewise
two Latin lexicons, which looked extravagant until you observed how each
did but supplement the other's deficiencies, and this so imperfectly
that their owner was still liable to search in vain for words between MO
and NA.

These, however, were evidently not the most prized portion of Mr.
Polymathers's library, though he displayed them with some complacency,
reading out here and there a sonorous "furrin" phrase, at which his
audience said, "More power," and "Your sowl to glory," and the like. It
was when he handled the shabbiest of the volumes, with broken backs and
edges all curling tatters, that his touch grew caressing. The
lookers-on, contrariwise, thought but poorly of them because they set
up, seemingly, to be illustrated works, and their pictures, mostly of
uninteresting round and three-cornered objects, struck Lisconnel art
critics as very feeble efforts. To be sure Mr. Polymathers called them
_dygrims_, but that was no help to the overtaxed imagination. Only young
Nicholas O'Beirne list