A few musical instruments.  Plenty of ribbons and rosettes; also, emblems of mysterious device.  Banners inscribed with moral texts.  Miss Hurribattle.  The school-children in white.  Members of the School-Committee in demi-toilet.  More banners.  Mr. Stellato, as chief of the Gladiators, covered with a pasteboard helmet, and bearing a shield inscribed “TRUTH.” (N.B.  The inscription in German text by the school-children.) The Progressive Guard with javelins,—­papier-mache tips gummed over with shiny paper.  A Transparency,—­at least it could be used as such in lecturing emergencies,—­representing the interesting medical illustration to which Mrs. Romulus had alluded in the morning.  The choir singing a progressive anthem, accompanied by extravagant gestures.  Other banners waved in cadence with progressive stanzas.  Mrs. Romulus and the Lilac-Hill Water-Cure Establishment.  Progressive citizens generally; these in various stages of exaltation, and cheering fervently.

“The old infectious hysteria of religious revivals, limited by fresh air and gentle exercise, is it not, Dr. Dastick?”

The Doctor answered my inquiry with a non-committal “humph” of the most professional sort.

“Plato tells us that the Greek Rhapsodists could not recite Homer without falling into convulsions,” said Professor Owlsdarck.

“That is very remarkable,” said Colonel Prowley, deeply impressed.

“I had no idea that these youths and maidens could justify their eccentric proceedings by so high an authority,” observed his sister.

The brother objected.  He thought that the same effects could not rightly be attributed to a modern song-writer and the Blind Old Poet.

“Blind Old Poet!” exclaimed one of the undergraduates, very thoughtlessly.  “Why, my dear Colonel Prowley, you are blinder than ever he was!  Don’t you know that recent scholarship has demonstrated Homer to be nobody in particular?  The ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ are mere agglomerations of the poetical effusions of a variety of persons; and doubtless all of them could see as well as you and I can.”

It was distressing to mark the grief and indignation which suddenly clouded the countenance of my old friend.  Was not the last noticeable publication in post-classical literature the “Rasselas” of Dr. Johnson?  Had not all those well-disposed people who hailed it as the brightest combination of literary and moral excellence which a mere modern could produce,—­had they not lived and died in respectable allegiance to the Homeric personality?  To say nothing of a mystical admiration of the Greek hexameters which he could not construe, Colonel Prowley was a diligent reader of Pope’s sonorous travesty.  He felt like some simple believer in the divine right of kings, when the mob have broken into the palace, and stand in no awe of the stucco and red velvet.  Yes, of course I admire original minds,—­but then I love those which are not original.  And truly there was a stately echo about the old gentleman which always went to my heart.