in its feelings and aspects. It was a dream. It was dreamed by
Caesar Augustus's mother, and interpreted at the usual rates:

Atia, before her delivery, dreamed that her bowels stretched to
the stars and expanded through the whole circuit of heaven and
earth.--SUETONIUS, p. 139.

That was in the augur's line, and furnished him no difficulties, but it
would have taken Rawlinson and Champollion fourteen years to make sure
of what it meant, because they would have been surprised and dizzy. It
would have been too late to be valuable, then, and the bill for service
would have been barred by the statute of limitation.

In those old Roman days a gentleman's education was not complete until
he had taken a theological course at the seminary and learned how to
translate entrails. Caesar Augustus's education received this final
polish. All through his life, whenever he had poultry on the menu he
saved the interiors and kept himself informed of the Deity's plans by
exercising upon those interiors the arts of augury.

In his first consulship, while he was observing the auguries, twelve
vultures presented themselves, as they had done to Romulus. And when he
offered sacrifice, the livers of all the victims were folded inward in
the lower part; a circumstance which was regarded by those present who
had skill in things of that nature, as an indubitable prognostic of
great and wonderful fortune.--SUETONIUS, p. 141.

"Indubitable" is a strong word, but no doubt it was justified, if the
livers were really turned that way. In those days chicken livers were
strangely and delicately sensitive to coming events, no matter how far
off they might be; and they could never keep still, but would curl and
squirm like that, particularly when vultures came and showed interest in
that approaching great event and in breakfast.

II

We may now skip eleven hundred and thirty or forty years, which brings
us down to enlightened Christian times and the troubled days of King
Stephen of England. The augur has had his day and has been long ago
forgotten; the priest had fallen heir to his trade.

King Henry is dead; Stephen, that bold and outrageous person, comes
flying over from Normandy to steal the throne from Henry's daughter.
He accomplished his crime, and Henry of Huntington, a priest of high
degree, mourns over it in his Chronicle. The Archbishop of Canterbury
consecrated Stephen: "wherefore the Lord visited the Archbishop with the
same judgment w