The secretary
who archaeologises is lost. His business is not to discourse of early
English windows or of palaeolithic hatchets, of buried villas or of
Plantagenet pedigrees, of Roman tile-work or of dolichocephalic skulls,
but to provide abundant brakes, drags, and carriages, to take care that
the owners of castles and baronial residences throw them open (with
lunch provided) to the ardent student of British antiquities, to see
that all the old ladies have somebody to talk to, and all the young ones
somebody to flirt with, and generally to superintend the morals,
happiness, and personal comfort of some fifty assorted scientific
enthusiasts. The secretary who diverges from these his proper and
elevated functions into trivial and puerile disquisitions upon the
antiquity of man (when he ought rather to be admiring the juvenility of
woman), or the precise date of the Anglo-Saxon conquest (when he should
by rights be concentrating the whole force of his massive intellect upon
the arduous task of arranging for dinner), proves himself at once
unworthy of his high position, and should forthwith be deposed from the
secretariat by public acclamation.
Having once entrapped your perfect secretary, you set him busily to work
beforehand to make all the arrangements for your expected excursion, the
archaeologists generally cordially recognising the important principle
that he pays all the expenses he incurs out of his own pocket, and
drives splendid bargains on their account with hotel-keepers, coachmen,
railway companies, and others to feed, lodge, supply, and convey them at
fabulously low prices throughout the whole expedition.
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