d he had sealed his doom! When I read his beautiful poem, I
gasped in wonder, for only I on earth fathomed the significance of this
revelation. This dream of a poet's fanciful soul, soaring on the wings
of Pegasus, was stern reality to me and anxiously I awaited
developments. Nor waited I in vain.

The grateful Sphinx showered honor and wealth upon my friend. The
generous sportive boy, who cared naught for gold, actually grew rich,
for the Sphinx had granted him the most lucrative office in the county,
the people made him their sheriff. He rose step by step to the highest
place of honor in the community until he became the mayor of Prescott.
Not satisfied with this token of its favor, the Sphinx rewarded him in
a most extraordinary and convincing manner. By the help of nature, its
help-meet, it transformed a great deposit of siliceous limestone into
beautiful onyx and painted it in all the colors and after the pattern
of the rainbow. This magnificent gift made Captain O'Neill
independently rich, but it is a fact that as soon as it passed from his
hands, the stone lost in value and no one has since profited from it. I
believe that our hero would have risen to the highest position of
dignity on earth, the Presidency of the United States, if he had not
unwittingly aroused the jealousy of the terrible heathen god. When he
chose a wife from the lovely maidens of Prescott, then the vengeful
Sphinx laid its sinister plans for his undoing, for it is in the nature
of cats, small or great, to be exceedingly jealous. The furious idol
remembered the people of a long forgotten race, its loyal subjects, who
had reared and worshiped it, inconceivably long ago, when the Grand
Canyon of Arizona was but a tiny ravine and before icy avalanches had
ground the rocks at the Dells into boulders. It remembered the
descendants of its subjects, the Aztec Indians. It remembered how the
Spaniards had cruelly broken the Aztec nation. Through the subtle
influence of psychic forces, it stirred up a passion of hate for Spain
in the hearts of the people of the United States, and it fostered the
awful spirit of strife, and at the right moment it let loose the dogs
of war. One convulsive touch of its rocky claws on the hidden currents
coursing in earth's veins and an evil spark fired the fatal mine under
the battleship Maine, in the harbor of Havana.

"Is this possible; can this be true?" If not, why is it that at the
call to arms, even before the natio