Page:The Diothas, or, A far look ahead (IA diothasorfarlook01macn).pdf/251

 knob within reach of my arm, and the room was flooded with light; an easily made adjustment of my hammock, and I had a most luxurious reading-chair.

Taking up Eured Thiusen's great work on the nineteenth century, I chanced to open at the appendix, in which were given notes on points that had appeared to the author of special interest or difficulty. Though monuments of shrewdness, learning, and research, these notes abounded with the, at times, ludicrous errors into which even the most careful writer is apt to fall when obliged to eke out imperfect knowledge by conjecture.

In the by no means amiable mood in which I befound myself at the time, I derived, perhaps, too malicious a pleasure from the mistakes of a painstaking author. If I give a few here, it is only in order to show how difficult it is to avoid error when treating of a period twice as remote as is that of Abraham from us.

Thus, in combating a prevailing error in regard to the significance of the term "Stalwart," so frequently recurring in the fragmentary history of that period, he showed that it was an utter misconception, having its source in the unscrupulous language of a venal and licentious press. The Stalwarts were not, as one legend asserted, a band of robbers who, under their notorious leader Gatto-Rusco, waylaid and murdered a public officer because he refused to surrender to them the treasure committed to his keeping.

This legend derived some support, it is true, from the etymology of the word "stalwart" as given in a standard authority of the period. Nor was the fact of the assassination of a great officer to be relegated to the long