Though you do
not listen, I shall still relate my stories by way of practice. I will
address them to the walls, or to the air, or to the defunct gods and
goddesses of antiquity, should they happen at this moment to be hovering
over the city in a rage, as some of the unconverted would have us
believe; or to our neighbours the Goths, if they are seized with a
sudden desire to quite their encampments, and obtain a near view of the
fortifications that they are so discreetly unwilling to assault. Or,
these materials for a fit and decent auditory failing me, I will tell my
stories to the most attentive of all listeners--myself.'
And the sentinel, without further delay, opened his budget of anecdotes,
with the easy fluency of of a man who possessed a well-placed confidence
in the perfection of his capacities for narration. Determined that his
saturnine colleague should hear him, though he would not give him his
attention, he talked in a raised voice, pacing briskly backwards and
forwards over the space of his allotted limits, and laughing with
ludicrous regularity and complacency at every jest that he happened to
make in the course of his ill-rewarded narrative.
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