"What about language?" I asked. "You're all right, Sandy?"
"I know German fairly well; and I can pass anywhere as a Turk. The first will do for eavesdropping and the second for ordinary business."
"And you?" I asked Blenkiron.
"I was left out at Pentecost," he said. "I regret to confess I have no gift of tongues."
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, August 01, 2017
Left Out at Pentecost
John Buchan (1875-1940), Greenmantle (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, ©1916), p. 40: