are might pour into this silent quarter of the city and
seize upon him again. It behoved him to learn all he could while there
was time. He turned suddenly to the old man with a question and left it
unsaid. But his motion moved the old man to speech again.

"Eh! but how things work together!" said the old man. "This Sleeper that
all the fools put their trust in! I've the whole history of it--I was
always a good one for histories. When I was a boy--I'm that old--I used
to read printed books. You'd hardly think it. Likely you've seen
none--they rot and dust so--and the Sanitary Company burns them to make
ashlarite. But they were convenient in their dirty way. One learnt a
lot. These new-fangled Babble Machines--they don't seem new-fangled to
you, eh?--they're easy to hear, easy to forget. But I've traced all the
Sleeper business from the first."

"You will scarcely believe it," said Graham slowly, "I'm so
ignorant--I've been so preoccupied in my own little affairs, my
circumstances have been so odd--I know nothing of this Sleeper's history.
Who was he?"

"Eh!" said the old man. "I know, I know. He was a poor nobody, and set
on a playful woman, poor soul! And he fell into a trance. There's the
old things they had, those brown things--silver photographs--still
showing him as he lay, a gross and a half years ago--a gross and a half
of years."

"Set on a playful woman, poor soul," said Graham softly to himself, and
then aloud, "Yes--well go on."

"You must know he had a cousin named Warming, a solitary man without
children, who made a big fortune speculating in roads--the first
Eadhamite roads. But surely you've heard? No? Why? He bought all the
patent rights and made a big company. In those days there were grosses of
grosses of separate businesses and business companies. Grosses of
grosses! His roads killed the railroads--the old things--in two dozen
years; he bought up and Eadhamited the tracks. And because he didn't want
to break up his great property or let in shareholders, he left it all to
the Sleeper, and put it under a Board of Trustees that he had picked and
trained. He knew then the Sleeper wouldn't wake, that he would go on
sleeping, sleeping till he died. He knew that quite well! And plump! a
man in the United States, who had lost two sons in a boat accident,
followed that up with another great bequest. His trustees found
themselves with a dozen myriads of lions'-worth or more of property at
the very beginni