rst class! . . . Did you ever look out the word "prophetes" in
Liddell and Scott?'

'Why, what do you know about Liddell and Scott?'

'Nothing, thank goodness; I never had time to waste over the crooked
letters. But I have heard say that prophetes means, not a
foreteller, but an out-teller--one who declares the will of a deity,
and interprets his oracles. Is it not so?'

'Undeniably.'

'And that he became a foreteller among heathens at least--as I
consider, among all peoples whatsoever--because knowing the real
bearing of what had happened, and what was happening, he could
discern the signs of the times, and so had what the world calls a
shrewd guess--what I, like a Pantheist as I am denominated, should
call a divine and inspired foresight--of what was going to happen.'

'A new notion, and a pleasant one, for it looks something like a
law.'

'I am no scollard, as they would say in Whitford, you know; but it
has often struck me, that if folks would but believe that the
Apostles talked not such very bad Greek, and had some slight notion
of the received meaning of the words they used, and of the absurdity
of using the same term to express nineteen different things, the New
Testament would be found to be a much simpler and more severely
philosophic book than "Theologians" ("Anthropo-sophists" I call
them) fancy.'

'Where on earth did you get all this wisdom, or foolishness?'

'From the prophet, a fortnight ago.'

'Who is this prophet? I will know.'

'Then you will know more than I do. Sabina--light my meerschaum,
there's a darling; it will taste the sweeter after your lips.' And
Claude laid his delicate woman-like limbs upon the sofa, and looked
the very picture of luxurious nonchalance.

'What is he, you pitiless wretch?'

'Fairest Hebe, fill our Prometheus Vinctus another glass of
Burgundy, and find your guitar, to silence him.'

'It was the ocean nymphs who came to comfort Prometheus--and
unsandalled, too, if I recollect right,' said Lancelot, smiling at
Sabina. 'Come, now, if he will not tell me, perhaps you will?'

Sabina only blushed, and laughed mysteriously.

'You surely are intimate with him, Claude? When and where did you
meet him first?'

'Seventeen years ago, on the barricades of the three days, in the
charming little pandemonium called Paris, he picked me out of a
gutter, a boy of fifteen, with a musket-ball through my body; mended
me, and sent me to a pa