Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/260

 conversation announcing that, in honor of Saint Mary of the Sea, the family had adopted a fish diet, and that they had made a penitential hymn, which they at once proceeded to chant. It ran something like this:—

and so forth. The only other scraps of the table talk which I retain are connected with Cornelia's amused and amusing summary of a letter from Ethelwyn, who had visited her "Arabian saint" and reported that the leader of her party, an ex-Evangelical clergyman from Nebraska, who spoke only English and had never before been outside the United States, had, on being addressed by the saint in Arabic, understood perfectly everything that was said to him.

"My Lord!" Oliver exclaimed,—"I beg your pardon,—By Pollux! I wish I could get up my Vergil that way!" Dorothy said that she didn't understand why her mother and the rest of them made so much fun of Cousin Ethelwyn: it seemed to her, she said demurely, "very much like Pentecost." Father Blakewell explained the dis-