Blank is
to deliver one of his archaeological lectures at the Town Hall. We are
met at the door by the secretary of the local archaeological society: a
melancholy lady in green plush, who suffers from St Vitus's dance.
Gloomily we enter the hall and silently accept the seats which are
indicated to us by an unfortunate gentleman with a club-foot. In front
of us an elderly female with short hair is chatting to a very plain
young woman draped like a lay figure. On the right an emaciated man with
a very bad cough shuffles on his chair; on the left two old grey-beards
grumble to one another about the weather, a subject which leads up to
the familiar "Mine catches me in the small of the back"; while behind
us the inevitable curate, of whose appearance it would be trite to
speak, describes to an astonished old lady the recent discovery of the
pelvis of a mastodon.

The professor and the aged chairman step on to the platform; and, amidst
the profoundest gloom, the latter rises to pronounce the prefatory
rigmarole. "Archaeology," he says, in a voice of brass, "is a science
which bars its doors to all but the most erudite; for, to the layman who
has not been vouchsafed the opportunity of studying the dusty volumes of
the learned, the bones of the dead will not reveal their secrets, nor
will the crumbling pediments of naos and cenotaph, the obliterated
tombstones, or the worm-eaten parchments, tell us their story. To-night,
however, we are privileged; for Professor Blank will open the doors for
us that we may gaze for a moment upon that solemn charnel-house of the
Past in which he has sat for so many long hours of inductive
meditation."

And the professor by his side, whose head, perhaps, was filled with the
martial music of the long-lost hosts of the Lord, or before whose eyes
there swayed the entrancing forms of the dancing-girls of Babylon,
stares horrified from chairman to audience. He sees crabbed old men and
barren old women before him, afflicted youths and fatuous maidens; and
he realises at once that the golden keys which he possesses to the gates
of the treasury of the jewelled Past will not open the doors of that
charnel-house which they desire to be shown. The scent of the king's
roses fades from his nostrils, the Egyptian music which throbbed in his
ears is hushed, the glorious illumination of the Palace of a Thousand
Columns is extinguished; and in the gathering gloom we leave him
fumbling with a rusty key at the m