They both
looked round, and there was St Charles sitting in the easy chair.
'So far,' murmured the Saint to the Devil suavely, 'so far from being
four minutes too early, you are exactly a year too late.' On saying
this, the Saint smiled a genial, priestly smile, folded his hands,
twiddled his thumbs slowly round and round, and gazed in a fatherly
way at the Devil.
'What do you mean?' shouted the Devil.
'What I say,' said St Charles calmly; '1900 is not the last year of
the nineteenth century; it is the first year of the twentieth.'
'Oh!' sneered the Devil, 'are you an anti-vaccinationist as well? Now,
look here' (and he began counting on his fingers); 'supposing in the
year 1 B.C. ...'
'I never argue,' said St Charles.
'Well, all I know is,' answered the Devil with some heat, 'that in
this matter as in most others, thank the Lord, I have on my side all
the historians and all the scientists, all the universities, all
the...'
'And I,' interrupted St Charles, waving his hand like a gentleman (he
is a Borromeo), 'I have the Pope!'
At this the Devil gave a great howl, and disappeared in a clap of
thunder, and was never seen again till his recent appearance at
Brighton.
So the Learned Man was saved; but hardly; for he had to spend five
hundred years in Purgatory catechizing such heretics and pagans as got
there, and instructing them in the true faith. And with the more
muscular he passed a knotty time.
You do not see the river Po till you are close to it. Then, a little
crook in the road being passed, you come between high trees, and
straight out before you, level with you, runs the road into and over a
very wide mass of tumbling water. It does not look like a bridge, it
looks like a quay. It does not rise; it has all the appearance of
being a strip of road shaved off and floated on the water.
All this is because it passes over boats, as do some bridges over the
Rhine. (At Cologne, I believe, and certainly at Kiel - for I once sat
at the end of that and saw a lot of sad German soldiers drilling, a
memory which later made me understand (1) why they can be out-marched
by Latins; (2) why they impress travellers and civilians; (3) why the
governing class in Germany take care to avoid common service; (4) why
there is no promotion from the ranks; and (5) why their artillery is
too rigid and not quick enough.
