But stranger than these repetitions are the coincidences one finds in the manners and speech of antiquity and our own time.  In the days when Flood Ireson was drawn in the cart by the Maenads of Marblehead, that fishing town had the name of nurturing a young population not over fond of strangers.  It used to be said that if an unknown landsman showed himself in the streets, the boys would follow after him, crying, “Rock him!  Rock him!  He’s got a long-tailed coat on!”

Now if one opens the Odyssey, he will find that the Phaeacians, three thousand years ago, were wonderfully like these youthful Marbleheaders.  The blue-eyed Goddess who convoys Ulysses, under the disguise of a young maiden of the place, gives him some excellent advice.  “Hold your tongue,” she says, “and don’t look at anybody or ask any questions, for these are seafaring people, and don’t like to have strangers round or anybody that does not belong here.”

Who would have thought that the saucy question, “Does your mother know you’re out?” was the very same that Horace addressed to the bore who attacked him in the Via Sacra?

     Interpellandi locus hic erat; Est tibi mater? 
     Cognati, queis te salvo est opus?

And think of the London cockney’s prefix of the letter h to innocent words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of the vulgar Roman, as may be seen in the verses of Catullus: 

     Chommoda dicebat, siquando commoda vellet
     Dicere, et hinsidias Arrius insidias. 
     Et tum mirifice sperabat se esse locutum,
     Cum quantum poterat, dixerat hinsidias...

     Hoc misso in Syriam, requierant omnibus aures... 
     Cum subito affertur nuncius horribilis;
     Ionios fluctus, postquam illue Arrius isset,
     Jam non Ionios esse, sed Hionios.

—­Our neighbors of Manhattan have an excellent jest about our crooked streets which, if they were a little more familiar with a native author of unquestionable veracity, they would strike out from the letter of “Our Boston Correspondent,” where it is a source of perennial hilarity.  It is worth while to reprint, for the benefit of whom it may concern, a paragraph from the authentic history of the venerable Diedrich Knickerbocker: 

“The sage council, as has been mentioned in a preceding chapter, not being able to determine upon any plan for the building of their city,—­the cows, in a laudable fit of patriotism, took it under their peculiar charge, and as they went to and from pasture, established paths through the bushes, on each side of which the good folks built their houses; which is one cause of the rambling and picturesque turns and labyrinths, which distinguish certain streets of New York at this very day.”

—­When I was a little boy there came to stay with us for a while a young lady with a singularly white complexion.  Now I had often seen the masons slacking lime, and I thought it was the whitest thing I had ever looked upon.  So I always called this fair visitor of ours Slacked Lime.  I think she is still living in a neighboring State, and I am sure she has never forgotten the fanciful name I gave her.  But within ten or a dozen years I have seen this very same comparison going the round of the papers, and credited to a Welsh poet, David Ap Gwyllym, or something like that, by name.