Well, They Didn't Have Television!

[T]he Scottish publisher William Chambers wrote the biography of his brother Robert, with whom he had founded in 1832 the famous Edinburgh company that bears their name, and recollected certain such readings in their boyhood town of Peebles. "My brother and I," he wrote, "derived much enjoyment, not to say instruction, from the singing of old ballads, and the telling of legendary stories, by a kind old female relative, the wife of a decayed tradesman, who dwelt in one of the ancient closes. At her humble fireside, under the canopy of a huge chimney, where her half-blind and superannuated husband sat dozing in a chair, the battle of Corunna and other prevailing news was strangely mingled with disquisitions on the Jewish wars. The source of this interesting conversation was a well-worn copy of L'Estrange's translation of Josephus, a small folio of date 1720. The envied possessor of the work was Tam Fleck, "a flichty chield", as he was considered, who, not particularly steady at his legitimate employment, stuck out a sort of profession by going about in the evening with his Josephus, which he read as the current news; the only light he had for doing so being usually that imparted by the flickering blaze of a piece of parrot coal. It was his practice not to read more than from two or three pages at a time, interlarded with sagacious remarks of his own by way of foot-notes, and in this way he sustained an extraordinary interest in the narrative. Retailing the matter with great equability in different households, Tam kept all at the same point of information, and would them up with a corresponding anxiety as to the issue of some moving event in Hebrew annals. Although in this way he went through a course of Josephus yearly, the novelty somehow never seemed to wear off.

"Weel, Tam, what's the news the nicht?" would old Geordie Murray say, as Tam entered with his Josephus under this arm, and seated himself at the family fireside.

"Bad news, bad news," replied Tam. "Titus has begun to beseige Jerusalem, -- it's gaun to be a terrible business."

--page 119-20.