ambiguity and the frequent evasion of conscious
guilt, there can be no longer any reasonable doubt that these barbarians
DO NOT WORSHIP THEIR ANCESTORS!

Hitherto the matter had rested in my mind as an uneasy breath of
suspicion, agitated from time to time by countless indications that
such a possibility might, indeed, exist in a condensed form, but too
inauspiciously profane to be contemplated in the altogether. Thus, when
in the company of the young this person has walked about the streets
of the city, he may at length have said, "Truly, out of your amiable
condescension, you have shown me a variety of entrancing scenes. Let
us now in turn visit the tombs of your ancestors, to the end that I may
transmit fitting gifts to their spirits and discharge a few propitious
fireworks as a greeting." Yet in no case has this well-intentioned
offer been agilely received, one asserting that he did not know
the resting-place of the tombs in question, a second that he had no
ancestors, a third that Kensal Green was not an entrancing spot for
a wet afternoon, a fourth that he would see them removed to a greater
distance first, another that he drew the line at mafficking in a
cemetery, and the like. These things, it may occur to your omniscience,
might in themselves have been conclusive, yet the next reference to the
matter would perhaps be tending to a more alluring hope.

"To-morrow," a person has remarked in the hearing of this one, "I go
to the Stratford which is upon the Avon, and without a pause I shall
prostrate myself intellectually before the immortal Shakespeare's tomb
and worship his unequalled memory."

"The intention is benevolently conceived," I remarked. "Yet has he no
descendants, this same Shakespeare, that the conciliation of his spirit
must be left to chance?"

When he assured me that this calamity had come about, I would have added
a richly-gilded brick from my store for transmission also, in the hope
that the neglected and capricious shadow would grant me an immunity from
its resentful attention, but the one in question raised a barrier of
dissent. If I wished to adorn a tomb, he added (evading the deeper
significance of the act), there was that of Goldsmith within its Temple,
upon which many impressionable maidens from across the Bitter Waters of
the West make it a custom to deposit chaplets of verses, in the hope
of seeing the offering chronicled in the papers; and in the Open Space
called Trafalgar there we