With his arms folded in an attitude of enforced patience and complacent superiority, the other listened.
"Curious, . . curious!" he murmured in a mild sotto-voce,--"A would- be pessimist!--aye, aye,--'tis very greatly the fashion for young men in these days to assume the manner of elderly and exhausted cynics who have tried everything and approve of nothing! 'Tis a strange craze!--but, my good sir, let us keep to the subject at present under discussion. Like all unripe philosophers, you wander from the point. I did not ask you for your opinion concerning the uselessness or the efficiency of learning,--I merely sought to discover whether you, like the silly throng that lately scattered right and left of you, had any foolish forebodings respecting the transformed color of this river,--a color which, however seeming peculiar, arises, as all good scholars know, from causes that are perfectly simple and easily explainable."
Theos hesitated,--his eyes wandered involuntarily to the flowing tide, which now with the fully risen sun seemed more than ever brilliant and lurid in its sanguinary hue.
"Strange things have been said of late concerning Al-Kyris,--" he answered at last, slowly and after a thoughtful pause,--"Things that, though wild and vague, are not without certain dark presages and ominous suggestions. This crimson flood may be, as you say, the natural effect of purely natural causes,--yet, notwithstanding this, it seems to me a singular phenomenon--nay, even a weird and almost fatal augury?"
His companion laughed--a gentle, careless laugh of amused disdain.
"Phenomenon! ... augury! ..." he exclaimed shrugging his shoulders lightly ... "These words, my young friend, are terms that nowadays belong exclusively to the vocabulary of the uneducated masses; we,--and by WE, I mean scientists, and men of the highest culture,--have long ago rejected them as unmeaning and therefore unnecessary. Phenomenon is a particularly vile expression, serving merely to designate anything wonderful and uncommon,--whereas to the scientific eye, there is nothing left in the world that ought to excite so vulgar and barbarous an emotion as wonder, . . nothing so apparently rare that cannot be reduced at once from the ignorant exaggerations of enthusiasm to the sensible level of the commonplace? The so-called 'marvels' of nature have, thanks to the advancement of practical education, entirely ceased to affect by either surprise or admiration the carefully matured, mathematically adjusted, and technically balanced brain of the finished student or professor of Organic Evolution,--and as for the idea of 'auguries' or portents, nothing could well be more entirely at variance with our present system of progressive learning, whereby Human Reason is trained and taught to pulverize into indistinguishable atoms all supernatural propositions, and to gradually eradicate from the mind the absurd notion of a Deity or deities, whom it is necessary to propitiate in order to live well. Much time is of course required to elevate the multitude above all desire for a Religion,--but the seed has been sown, and the harvest will be reaped, and a glorious Era is fast approaching, when the free-thinking, free-speaking people of all nations shall govern themselves and rejoice in the grand and God-less Light of Universal Liberty?"