“Well, I dunno.  I wouldn’t mind sending you a letter now and then, but I don’t care to make any regular engagement.  You see I haven’t written a great deal for about eighteen hundred years, and a man kind of gets out of practice in that time.  I write such an awful poor hand, too.  No; I guess I won’t contribute regularly.  I have thought sometimes maybe I might do a little work as a book-agent, so’s to pick up a few stray dollars.  But I never had a fair chance offered to me, and I didn’t care enough about it to hunt it up; and so nothing ever came of it.  I could make a good book fairly hum around this globe, though, don’t you think?”

“Were you ever married?  Did you ever have a wife?”

“See here, my son, I never did you any harm, and what’s the use of your bringing up such disagreeable reminiscences?  The old lady died in Egypt in 73.  They made her up into a mummy, and I reckon they put a pyramid on her to hold her down.  That’s enough; that satisfies me.”

“Is your memory generally good?”

“Well, about fair; that’s all.  I know I used to get Petrarch mixed up in my mind with St. Peter, and I’ve several times alluded to Plutarch as the god of the infernal regions.  I’m often hazy about people.  The queerest thing!  You know that once, in conversation with Benjamin Franklin, I confounded Mark Antony with Saint Anthony, and actually alluded to the saint’s oration over the dead body of Caesar.  Positive fact.  I’ll tell you how I often keep the run of things:  I say of a certain event, ‘That happened during the century that I was bilious,’ or, ‘It occurred in the century when I had rheumatism.’  That’s the way I fix the time.  I did commence to keep a diary back in 134, but I ran up a stack of manuscript three or four hundred feet high, and then I gave it up.  Couldn’t lug it round with me, you know.”

“I suppose you have known a great many celebrated people?”

“Plenty of ’em—­plenty of ’em, sir.  By the way, did anybody ever tell you that you looked like Mohammed?  Well, sir, you do.  Astonishing likeness!  Now, there was an old scalawag for you.  A perfect fraud!  I lent that man a pair of boots in 598, and he never returned them; said I’d get my reward hereafter.  I’ve regretted those boots for nearly thirteen hundred years.”

“Did it ever occur to you to lecture?”

“Oh yes; I’ve turned it over in my mind.  But I guess I won’t.  You see, my son, I’m so crammed full of information that if I began a discourse I could hardly stop under a couple of years; and that’s too long for a lecture, you know.  Then they might encore it; and so I hardly think I’d better go in.  No, I’ll just trudge along in the old fashion.”

“Have you any views about the questions of the day?  Are you in favor of soft money or hard?”

“Young man, the advice to you of a man who has studied the world for nearly two thousand years is to take any kind you can get.  That’s solid wisdom.”