'"
There was gentle laughter and the three below kept their heads tilted
upward.
"I think I shall tell you the story of my education," continued Maury,
"under these sardonic constellations."
"Do! Please!"
"Shall I, really?"
They waited expectantly while he directed a ruminative yawn toward the
white smiling moon.
"Well," he began, "as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against
future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred 'Now I
lay me's.'"
"Throw down a cigarette," murmured some one.
A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian
command:
"Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks
reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of
such skies."
Below, a lighted match was passed from cigarette to cigarette. The voice
resumed:
"I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes
until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I
believed that because a man cried out 'My God!' when a safe fell on him,
it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went
to school. For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to
ancient flint-locks and cried to me: 'There's the real thing.
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