Page:Baboohurrybungsh00anstiala.djvu/33

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JABBERJEE, B.A.
11

from Shakspeare's play of Macbeth in English and being correctly attired as a Scotch.

But presently I discovered that the play was quite another sort of Adelphi, being a jocose comedy by a notorious ancient author of the name of Terence, and written entirely in Latin, which a contiguous damsel expressed a fear lest she should find it incomprehensible and obscure. I hastened to reassure her by explaining that, having been turned out as a certificated B.A. by Indian College, I had acquired perfect familiarity and nodding acquaintance with the early Roman and Latin tongues, and offering my services as interpreter of "quicquid agunt homines" and the entire "farrago libelli" which rendered her red as a turkeycock with delight and gratitude. When the performance commenced with a scenic representation of the Roman Acropolis, and a venerable elderly man soliloquising lengthily to himself, and then carrying on a protracted logomachy with another greybeard—although I understood sundry colloquial idioms and phrases such as "uxorem duxit" "carum mihi" "quid agis?" "cur amat?" and the like, all of which I assiduously translated vivâ voce—I could not succeed in learning the reason why they were having such a snip-snap, until the interval, when the lady informed me herself that it was because one of them had carried off a nautch-girl belonging to the other's son—which caused me to marvel greatly at her erudition.