ty to listen to an address made by his guest in broken
English, on the ancient importance of Uxmal and Palenque. Hilbrough also
heard with attentive perplexity the Baron's account before the
Historical Society of the Aztec Calendar Stone, and his theory of its
real purpose.

When the American banker was left alone with the learned High Dutchman,
it became very serious business. Von Pohlsen, with all his erudition,
was extremely ignorant of the art of banking as practised in New York.
He did not know, at least in English, the difference between collateral
and real estate security, and "gilt-edged" paper was more foreign than
papyrus to him. Nor could Hilbrough interest him much in the remarkable
rise in Brooklyn real estate since 1860. Brooklyn was too new by a
millennium for the Baron to care for it. Hilbrough tried the plan of
shunting the antiquary to his main lines of American hieroglyphs,
aboriginal architecture, and Pueblo domestic economy. But this only
shifted the difficulty, for under the steady downpour of Pohlsen's
erudition, Hilbrough had continually to change position, now putting the
right knee over the left and now placing the left atop, to keep from
nodding, and he was even reduced to pinching himself, sometimes, in
order to keep awake, just as the learned and ingenious Baron had got his
pyramid of inference ready to balance on its rather slender apex of
fact. Archaeology was new to Hilbrough, and deductive profits so large
from inductive investments so small always seemed to the financier to
indicate bad security.

Mrs. Hilbrough, clever woman, appeared to understand it all. She had
crammed on a copy of Stephens's "Travels in Yucatan" that had belonged
to her father, and she gave Pohlsen no end of pleasure by asking him
about such things as the four-headed altars before the great idols at
Copan, and the nature of the great closed house at Labphak. If you will
look in Pohlsen's book of travels in America (Reise durch Amerika:
Leipzig, 1888) you will discover in his chapter on New York that in this
metropolis the ladies take a remarkable interest in science, and are
generally better informed regarding such matters than their husbands,
these latter being deeply immersed in mere dollar-hunting.

But Mrs. Hilbrough was much more interested in her reception to be given
in honor of Baron Pohlsen than she was in the four-headed altars of the
remoter Aztecs. If she could not fill her house with those very riche