Roland, who had that day found us
out.

"Please, not such hard words," said the Captain, shaking his head.

"Heraclea was the city of necromancers, in which they raised the dead.
Do want to speak to Cicero?--I invoke him. Do I want to chat in the
Athenian market-place, and hear news two thousand years old?--I write
down my charm on a slip of paper, and a grave magician calls me up
Aristophanes. And we owe all this to our ancest--"

"Ancestors who wrote books; thank you."

Here Roland offered his snuff-box to my father, who, abhorring snuff,
benignly imbibed a pinch, and sneezed five times in consequence,--an
excuse for Uncle Roland to say, which he did five times, with great
unction, "God bless you, brother Austin!"

As soon as my father had recovered himself, he proceeded, with tears
in his eyes, but calm as before the interruption--for he was of the
philosophy of the Stoics,--

"But it is not that which is awful. It is the presuming to vie with
these `spirits elect;' to say to them, 'Make way,--I too claim place
with the chosen. I too would confer with the living, centuries after the
death that consumes my dust. I too--' Ah, Pisistratus! I wish Uncle Jack
had been at Jericho before he had brought me up to London and placed me
in the midst of those rulers of the world!"

I was busy, while my father spoke, in making some pendent shelves for
these "spirits elect;" for my mother, always provident where my father's
comforts were concerned, had foreseen the necessity of some such
accommodation in a hired lodging-house, and had not only carefully
brought up to town my little box of tools, but gone out herself that
morning to buy the raw materials. Checking the plane in its progress
over the smooth deal, "My dear father," said I, "if at the Philhellenic
Institute I had looked with as much awe as you do on the big fellows
that had gone before me, I should have stayed, to all eternity, the lag
of the Infant Division."

"Pisistratus, you are as great an agitator as your namesake," cried my
father, smiling. "And so, a fig for the big fellows!"

And now my mother entered in her pretty evening cap, all smiles and
good humor, having just arranged a room for Uncle Roland, concluded
advantageous negotiations with the laundress, held high council with
Mrs. Primmins on the best mode of defeating the extortions of London
tradesmen, and, pleased with herself and all the world, she kissed my
father's forehead as it bent over hi