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Occasionally some overlooked fragment of the past still cleaved to a town, and marked it for an old acquaintance, but often one had to get a mile away and look back on a place as one holds a palimpsest up against the light to identify the long overlaid lines of the beginnings.
Gideon was a mighty man of valour, and God was with him. The heavenly messenger read beneath the outward passing incident, and saw under the clumsy letters of the palimpsest the deep and holy characters which were awaiting the moment of complete discovery. Is not this, in fact, the meaning of the apostle, when he says that faith is reckoned to us for righteousness?
Aunt Mary laughed mischievously at Mollie. "That would be a sermon in stones and no mistake," Major Cambell said, with a smile. "We should require a regular palimpsest to hold them all. Think of Grizzel and all the pies she loves to have her fingers in all those people on their fruit farm for instance, mostly people who have been down on their luck one way or another.
With the words of Ernest Churchouse still in his ears, the foreman felt profound interest to learn what might be learned considering the changes in his master's character. He found a new Raymond, yet as the older writing of a parchment palimpsest will sometimes make itself apparent behind the new, glimpses of his earlier self did not lack.
That the elegant and flawless dilettante of the Cosmic Club should have come forth, at eleven o'clock of a morning, in such a state of comparative disreputability, argued an upheaval of mind little short of phenomenal. "A fake," he reiterated. "I've spent a night of pseudo-intellectual riot and ruin over it. You've almost destroyed a young and innocent mind with your infernal palimpsest, Average."
Hardly anyone else mentions this person, and his work had disappeared until Mai found pieces of it in a palimpsest at Naples which had come from Bobbio. We owe much to Cassiodorus in any case, for it was he who commended secular learning to monks, and the fact that monks were the great preservers of ancient literature cannot be dissociated from his influence.
Rather should one read the record of the rain, it seems, the story of the weather some morning, cycles since, with the way the wind was blowing written in the slanting drip of the rain-drops caught and petrified on the old red sandstone, marks of the Maker as he passed, one day, a million years ago, than decipher on the scroll of any palimpsest, under the light-headed visions of an anchorite, some half-erased ode of Anacreon.
Then he confronts groups of facts which have crossed his path; the understanding, cultivated and enlarged, draws comparisons; the memories of youth reappear under the passions, like the traces of a palimpsest under the erasure; these memories form the bases of logic, and that which was a vision in the child's brain becomes a syllogism in the man's.
It seemed as though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the bounds of life which is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature.
"When this dries," said Thorndyke, "the writing will completely disappear, but it will reappear whenever the paper is again wetted." The Professor nodded. "Very ingenious," said he "a sort of artificial palimpsest, in fact. But I do not understand how that illiterate man could have written in the difficult Moabite script." "He did not," said Thorndyke.
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