“How was that?” inquired the stranger.

“Why, sir,” said the other, smiling, “he said that they murdered the clocks (beetles), and he looked upon every man with flat feet as an inhuman villain, who deserves, he says, to have his feet chopped off, and to be compelled to dance a hornpipe three times a day on his stumps.”

“Who is that broad-shouldered man,” asked the stranger, “dressed in rusty black, with the red head?”

“He went mad,” replied the conductor, “on a principle of religious charity.  He is a priest from the county of Wexford, who had been called in to baptize the child of a Protestant mother, which, having done, he seized a tub, and placing it on the child’s neck, killed it; exclaiming, ‘I am now sure of having sent one soul to heaven.’”

“You are not without poets here, of course?” said the stranger.

“We have, unfortunately,” replied the other, “more individuals of that class than we can well manage.  They ought to have an asylum for themselves.  There’s a fellow, now, he in the tattered jacket and nightcap, who has written a heroic poem, of eighty-six thousand verses, which he entitles ‘Balaam’s Ass, or the Great Unsaddled.’  Shall I call him over?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, no,” replied the stranger; “keep me from the poets.”

“There is one of the other species,” replied the gentleman, “the thin, red-eyed fellow, who grinds his teeth.  He fancies himself a wit and a satirist, and is the author of an unpublished poem, called ’The Smoking Dunghill, or Parnassus in a Fume.’  He published several things, which were justly attacked on account of their dulness, and he is now in an awful fury against all the poets of the day, to every one of whom he has given an appropriate position on the sublime pedestal, which he has, as it were, with his own hands, erected for them.  He certainly ought to be the best constructor of a dunghill in the world, for he deals in nothing but dirt.  He refuses to wash his hands, because, he says, it would disqualify him from giving the last touch to his poem and his characters.”

“Have you philosophers as well as poets here?” asked the stranger.

“Oh dear, yes, sir.  We have poetical philosophers, and philosophical poets; but, I protest to heaven, the wisdom of Solomon, or of an archangel, could not decide the difference between their folly.  There’s a man now, with the old stocking in his hand—­it is one of his own, for you may observe that he has one leg bare—­who is pacing up and down in a deep thinking mood.  That man, sir, was set mad by a definition of his own making.”

“Well, let us hear it,” said the stranger.

“Why, sir, he imagines that he has discovered a definition for ‘nothing.’  The definition, however, will make you smile.”

“And what, pray, is it?”

“Nothing,” he says, “is—­a footless stocking without a leg; and maintains that he ought to hold the first rank as a philosopher for having invented the definition, and deserves a pension from the crown.”