Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/174

 to fret the hearts of unborn wives), and never, in the outcome, to be thought of as a very serious loss to anybody, after all

These book-rolls burned with great rapidity, crackling cheerily as the garnered wisdom of Cato's octogenarian life dissolved in puffs of smoke, and the wit of Sosipater blazed for the last time in heating a pint of water But then in Parma long afterward Kennaston observed a monk erasing a song of Sappho's from a parchment on which the monk meant to inscribe a feeble little Latin hymn of his own composition; in an obscure village near Alexandria Kennaston saw the only existent copy of the Mimes of Herondas crumpled up and used as packing for a mummy-case; and at Prior Park Kennaston watched Mrs. Elizabeth Barnes, then acting as cook for Dr. William Warburton, destroy in making piecrust the unique manuscript copies of three of Shakespeare's dramas, which had never been printed.

And—conceding Heaven to be an actual place, and attainment of its felicities to be the object of human life—Kennaston could not, after all, de