“A devilish scoundrel,” said Manifold.  “He’s a rat, too.  Doolittle’s a rat; but I’ll poison him; yes, I’ll dose him with ratsbane, and then I can eat, drink, and swill away.  Is the philosopher’s wife a cripple?”

“He has no wife,” replied Doolittle.

“And what the devil, then, is he a philosopher for?  What on earth challenges philosophy in a husband so much as a wife,—­especially if she’s a cripple and has the use of her tongue?”

“Not being a married man myself,” replied the doctor, “I can give you no information on the subject; or rather I could if I would; but it would not be for your comfort:—­ask Manifold.”

“Ay; but he says there’s something wrong about his head—­sprouts pressing up, or something that way.  Ask Mrs. Rosebud will she hob or nob with me.  Mrs. Rosebud,” he proceeded, addressing the widow, “hob or nob?”

Mrs. Rosebud, knowing that he was nothing more nor less than a gouty old parson, bowed to him very coldly, but accepted his challenge, notwithstanding.

“Mrs. Rosebud,” he added, “what kind of a man was old Rosebud?”

“His family name,” replied the widow, “was not Rosebud but Yellowboy; and, indeed, to speak the truth, my dear old Rosebud had all the marks and tokens of the original family name upon him, for he was as thin as the philosopher there, and as yellow as saffron.  His mother, however, the night before he was born, dreamed that she was presented with a rosebud, and the name, being somewhat poetical, was adopted by himself and the family as a kind of set-off against the duck-foot color of the ancestral skin.”

The philosopher, in the meantime, finding himself interrupted, stood, with a complacent countenance, awaiting a pause in which he might proceed.  At length he got an opportunity of resuming.

“The world,” he added, “knows but little of the great founder of so many systems and theories connected with human life and philosophy.  It was he who invented the multiplication table, and solved the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid.  It was he who, from his profound knowledge of music, first discovered the music of the spheres—­a divine harmony, which, from its unbroken continuity, and incessant play in the heavenly bodies, we are incapable of hearing.”

“Where the deuce, then, is the use of it?” cried Captain Culverin; “it must be a very odd kind of music which we cannot hear.”

“The great Samian, sir, could hear it; but only in his heart and intellect, and after he had discovered the truthful doctrine of the metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls.”

“The transmigration of soles; why, my dear sir, doesn’t every fishwoman understand that?” observed the captain.  “Was the fellow a fisherman?”

“His great discovery, however, if mankind would only adopt it, was the healthful one of a vegetable diet, carried out by a fixed determination not to wear any dress made up from the skins or fleeces of animals that have been slain by man, but philosophically to confine himself to plain linen as I do.  O Lord! this rheumatism will be the death of me.  Pythagoras was one of the greatest philosophers.”