s not without his pleasures. One of them, I remember,
came from his interest in the study of architecture. For Askelon was a
finely built city; and he used to walk much in the streets of it,
gazing upon the fronts of the costly houses, all patterned, as I
understood, after the purest Greek orders. He used to walk around
admiring, and making me admire. But this man had a wonderful eye, a
visual gift which must have been, I think, much the same thing as the
second sight or clairvoyance of which we read; for upon the fronts of
these fine houses he saw more than what the delicate taste, the cunning
hand of the builder had placed there. I have heard him say that he was
"a Sunday's child," referring to some superstition not current in that
community--and he certainly made out writing upon those walls and doors
which I, for one, could never see, though I have no doubt that it was
really there. But they were legends which would have startled the
residents could they have been audibly published in the streets of
Askelon. "What inscriptions upon these door plates!" he would sometimes
remark, walking down the Pentodon, the most fashionable street in the
place: "Let me read you a few that I discern in this neighborhood"; and
as we passed slowly before the Greek houses he pronounced, one by one,
these remarkable words, reading them off, as it seemed, from the
lintels of the very finest edifices. I cannot give all of them, but
these, if I remember, were some: Charlatan, Tartufe, Peculator,
Sharper, Parthis mendacior; and when we came to one of the corner
houses, or "palaces," as they called them in Askelon, he said: "One of
our furtive men lives there--one of our men of three letters. We have
as many of them here in Askelon as ever existed in Plautus's time, and
they are quite as able now as they then were to live in fine houses to
which they have not quite the most honest claim in the world." While he
spoke the man of three letters came out and ran down the marble
staircase, smiling, and offering, I thought, to salute my friend as he
stepped into his chariot; but my friend, though he had clear sight for
the palace, did not see the owner.

But you were surely too severe, poor friend of mine. There were just
men even in Askelon--upright, religious, and intelligent, full of good
works. What if this clever conveyancer had appropriated to himself
enough to buy him a fine house? Was it not in the very air of Askelon
that he should do such