“During some of the earlier years of the seventh century, I was living in Ravenna, and there I had three or four scholars whom I taught occasionally.  I did not dare to keep a regular school, with fixed hours and all that; but while I was not working at my trade, which was then that of a mason, I gave lessons to some young people in the neighborhood.  Sometimes I taught in the evening, sometimes in bad weather when we did not work out of doors.  No one of my scholars showed any intelligence, except a girl about eighteen years old.  Her father, I think, was a professional robber, for his family lived very well, and he was generally absent from home at the head of a little band of desperate fellows, of whom there were a great many in that region.

“This girl, whose name was Rina, had an earnest desire for knowledge, and showed a great capacity for imbibing it and retaining it.  In fact, I believe she was the most intelligent person in that region.”

“Was she pretty?” asked Mrs. Crowder.

“Yes,” replied her husband; “she was very good-looking.  I was so interested in her desire for knowledge that I taught her a great deal more than I would have dared to teach anybody else; and the more I taught, the more she wanted to learn.

“I soon became very much concerned about Rina.  Some man of the neighborhood, old or young, would be sure to marry her before very long, and then there would be an end of the development of what I considered the brightest intellect of the day.”

“So to keep that from happening to her, thee married her thyself?” asked Mrs. Crowder.

Her husband smiled.  “Yes; that is what I did.  You know,” he said, addressing me, “that I believe that Mrs. Crowder takes more interest in my marriages than in anything else I have done in the course of my career.”

“Certainly I do,” she said, with a little flush.  “Of course thee had to be married, and it is natural enough that I should want to know whom thee married, and all about it.”

“Well,” said Mr. Crowder, “we must get on with this.  A priest with whom I was acquainted married us, and we immediately fled from Ravenna.  After a year or two of wandering through benighted countries where even kings and rulers could not write their names, and where reading seemed to be a lost art, except in the monasteries, we made up our minds, if possible, we would go from darkness into light, and so we set out on a journey to China.”

At this statement Mrs. Crowder and I looked surprised.

“I don’t wonder you open your eyes,” said he.  “It must seem odd to you, unless you are very familiar with the history of the period, that we should go from Europe to China in search of enlightenment and civilization; but that is what we did, and we found what we looked for.  As the Pope had sent an envoy to China, and as some Nestorian missionaries had gone there, I believed that we could go.