b Ader as an impostor, claiming nineteen
hundred years, and playing his part with the decency of respectable
lunacy, I could endure; but as a tedious wag, cheapening his egregious
story with song-book levity, his importance as an entertainer grew
less.

And then, as if he suspected my thoughts, he suddenly shifted his key.

"You'll excuse me, sir," he whined, "but sometimes I get a little
mixed in my head. I am a very old man; and it is hard to remember
everything."

I knew that he was right, and that I should not try to reconcile him
with Roman history; so I asked for news concerning other ancients with
whom he had walked familiar.

Above my desk hung an engraving of Raphael's cherubs. You could yet
make out their forms, though the dust blurred their outlines
strangely.

"Ye calls them 'cher-rubs'," cackled the old man. "Babes, ye
fancy they are, with wings. And there's one wid legs and a bow
and arrow that ye call Cupid--I know where they was found. The
great-great-great-grandfather of thim all was a billy-goat. Bein' an
editor, sir, do ye happen to know where Solomon s Temple stood?"

I fancied that it was in--in Persia? Well, I did not know.

"'Tis not in history nor in the Bible where it was. But I saw it,
meself. The first pictures of cher-rubs and cupids was sculptured upon
thim walls and pillars. Two of the biggest, sir, stood in the adytum
to form the baldachin over the Ark. But the wings of thim sculptures
was intindid for horns. And the faces was the faces of goats. Ten
thousand goats there was in and about the temple. And your cher-rubs
was billy-goats in the days of King Solomon, but the painters
misconstrued the horns into wings.

"And I knew Tamerlane, the lame Timour, sir, very well. I saw him at
Keghut and at Zaranj. He was a little man no larger than yerself, with
hair the colour of an amber pipe stem. They buried him at Samarkand.
I was at the wake, sir. Oh, he was a fine-built man in his coffin,
six feet long, with black whiskers to his face. And I see 'em throw
turnips at the Imperor Vispacian in Africa. All over the world I
have tramped, sir, without the body of me findin' any rest. 'Twas
so commanded. I saw Jerusalem destroyed, and Pompeii go up in the
fireworks; and I was at the coronation of Charlemagne and the lynchin'
of Joan of Arc. And everywhere I go there comes storms and revolutions
and plagues and fires. 'Twas so commanded. Ye have heard of the
Wandering Jew. 'Tis all so, exce