gentleman enough still to drink at my own expense!"

"I intended no offence, I'm sure, sir; it was only meant in a friendly
way."

"That is the offence, sir; that _is_ the offence! But, there, we'll say
no more about it; you can't help your profession, and I can't help my
prejudices. What was it you wanted to ask me?"

"Well," said Leander, "I was desirous of getting some information
respecting--ahem--a party by the name of (if I've caught the foreign
pronounciation) Haphrodite, otherwise known as Venus. Do you happen to
have heard tell of her?"

"Have I had a classical education, sir, or haven't I? Heard of her? Of
course I have. But why, in the name of Mythology, any hairdresser living
should trouble his head about Aphrodite, passes my comprehension. Leave
her alone, sir!"

"It's her who won't leave _me_ alone!" thought Leander; but he did not
say so. "I've a very particular reason for wishing to know; and I'm sure
if you could tell me all you'd heard about her, I'd take it very kind of
you."

"Want to pick my brains; well, you wouldn't be the first. But I am
here, sir, to rest my brain and refresh my body, not to deliver
peripatetic lectures to hairdressers on Grecian mythology."

"Well," said Leander, "I never meant you to give your information
peripatetic; I'm willing to go as far as half a crown."

"Conf----But, there, what's the good of being angry with you? Is this
the sort of thing you want for your half-crown?--Aphrodite, a later form
of the Assyrian Astarte; the daughter, according to some theogonies, of
Zeus and Dione; others have it that she was the offspring of the foam of
the sea, which gathered round the fragments of the mutilated Uranos----"

"That don't seem so likely, do it, sir?" said Leander.

"If you are going to crop in with idiotic remarks, I shall confine
myself to my supper."

"Don't stop, Mr. Freemoult, sir; it's most instructive. I'm attending."

But the old gentleman, after a manner he had, was sunk in a dreamy
abstraction for the moment, in which he apparently lost the thread, as
he resumed, "Whereupon Zeus, to punish her, gave her in wedlock to his
deformed son, Hephaestus."

"She never mentioned him to _me_," thought Leander; "but I suppose she's
a widow goddess by this time; I'm sure I _hope_ so."

"Whom," Mr. Freemoult was saying, "she deceived upon several occasions,
notably in the case of ----" And here he launched into a scandalous
chronicle, which determined Leander