and at the
agreeable thought the aged man laughed in his throat with simple humour.

"Assuredly," I replied; "--after you were dead."

"Eh?" exclaimed the venerable person, checking the fountain of his mirth
abruptly at the word. "Dead! not before? Doesn't--doesn't that seem a
bit of a waste?"

"Such has been the observance from the time of unrecorded antiquity," I
replied. "'Obey parents, respect the old, loyally uphold the sovereign,
and worship ancestors.'"

"Well, well," remarked the one beside me, "obedience and respect--that's
something nowadays. And you make them do it?"

"Our laws are unflinching in their application," I said. "No crime is
held to be more detestable than disrespect of those to whom we owe our
existence."

"Quite right," he agreed, "it's a pleasure to hear it. It must be a
great country, yours; a country with a future, I should say. Now, about
that youngest lad of my son Henry's--the one that drops pet lizards down
my neck, and threatened to put rat poison into his mother's tea when she
wouldn't take him to the Military Turneyment; what would they do to him
by your laws?"

"If the assertion were well sustained by competent witnesses," I
replied, "it would probably be judged so execrable an offence, that
a new punishment would have to be contrived. Failing that, he would
certainly be wrapped round from head to foot in red-hot chains, and thus
exposed to public derision."

"Ah, red-hot chains!" said the aged person, as though the words formed a
pleasurable taste upon his palate. "The young beggar! Well, he'd deserve
it."

"Furthermore," I continued, gratified at having found one who so
intelligently appreciated the deficiencies of his own country and the
unblemished perfection of ours, "his parents and immediate descendants,
if any should exist, would be submitted to a fate as inevitable but
slightly less contemptuous--slow compression, perchance; his parents
once removed (thus enclosing your venerable personality), and remoter
offsprings would be merely put to the sword without further ignominy,
and those of less kinship to about the fourth degree would doubtless
escape with branding and a reprimand."

"Lordelpus!" exclaimed the patriarchal one, hastily leaping to the
extreme limit of the wooden couch, and grasping his staff into a
significant attitude of defence; "what's that for?"

"Our system of justice is all-embracing," I explained. "It is reasonably
held that in such a case ei