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“Well, but you have schools and colleges, and you acquire knowledge, don’t you?”

“We have a few schools; but only the low-born children attend them, and they are taught only what their fathers learned. We do not try to know more. We reverence the past. It is a matter of pride among us to preserve the habits, the manners, the ideas, the social state which our fore-fathers had when they were sundered from their nation.”

“You live here pretty much as King Arthur and his subjects lived?”

“Yes. We have our chivalry; our knight errants; our tournaments; our castles—everything just as it was in the old time.”

“My dear,” said the Professor to Miss Baffin, “the wildest imagination could have conceived nothing like this. We shall be afforded an opportunity to study the middle ages on the spot.”

“Sometimes,” said the Hermit, gravely, “I have secret doubts whether our way is the best, whether in England and the rest of the world men may not have learned while we have remained ignorant; but I cannot tell. And no one would be willing to change if we could know the truth.”