've read four already and, counting this one, there are
five more to read."

Now Aunt Clarissa had never read Ancient Nineveh herself. Her bookseller
had assured her that it was a very remarkable set, quite rare and
complete. "We seldom pick one up nowadays, Mrs. Bute. You should buy
it." So Aunt Clarissa bought it, but she had never thought of reading
it.

She looked down over her nephew's shoulder at the broad page with its
diagram of an ancient temple and its drawings of human-headed bulls in
bas-relief.

"Why do you find it so interesting?" she asked.

Galusha looked up at her. His eyes were alight with excitement.

"They dig those things up over there," he said, pointing to one of
the bulls. "It's all sand and rocks--and everything, but they send an
expedition and the people in it figure out where the city or the temple
or whatever it is ought to be, and then they dig and--and find it. And
you can't tell WHAT you'll find, exactly. And sometimes you don't find
much of anything."

"After all the digging and work?"

"Yes, but that's where the fun comes in. Then you figure all over
again and keep on trying and trying. And when you DO find 'em there are
sculptures like this--oh, yards and yards of 'em--and all sort of queer,
funny old inscriptions to be studied out. Gee, it must be great! Don't
you think so, Auntie?"

Aunt Clarissa's reply was noncommittal. That evening she wrote a letter
to Augustus Cabot in Boston. "He is a good boy," she wrote, referring to
Galusha, "but queer--oh, dreadfully queer. It's his father's queerness
cropping out, of course, but it shouldn't be permitted to develop. I
have set my heart on his becoming a financier like the other Galushas in
our line. Of course he will always be a Bangs--more's the pity--but
his middle name is Cabot and his first IS Galusha. I think he had best
continue his schooling in or near Boston where you can influence
him, Augustus. I wish him well grounded in mathematics and--oh, you
understand, the financial branches. Select a school, the right sort of
school, for him, to oblige me, will you, Gus?"

Augustus Cabot chose a school, a select, aristocratic and expensive
school near the "Hub of the Universe." Thither, in the fall, went
Galusha and there he remained until he was eighteen, when he entered
Harvard. At college, as at school, he plugged away at his studies,
and he managed to win sufficiently high marks in mathematics. But his
mathematical genius wa