fib, lie, beg, borrow, steal, hang, drown--as in the laughing
and weeping, tricking and truckling, hanging and drowning times that
have been. Nothing changes, though much be new-fashioned: new fashions
but revivals of things previous. In the books of the past we learn
naught but of the present; in those of the present, the past. All
Mardi's history--beginning middle, and finis--was written out in
capitals in the first page penned. The whole story is told in a title-
page. An exclamation point is entire Mardi's autobiography."

"Who speaks now?" said Media, Bardianna, Azzageddi, or Babbalanja?"

"All three: is it not a pleasant concert?"

"Very fine: very fine.--Go on; and tell us something of the future."

"I have never departed this life yet, my lord."

"But just now you said you were risen from the dead." "From the buried
dead within me; not from myself, my lord."

"If you, then, know nothing of the future--did Bardianna?"

"If he did, naught did he reveal. I have ever observed, my lord, that
even in their deepest lucubrations, the profoundest, frankest,
ponderers always reserve a vast deal of precious thought for their own
private behoof. They think, perhaps, that 'tis too good, or too bad;
too wise, or too foolish, for the multitude. And this unpleasant
vibration is ever consequent upon striking a new vein of ideas in the
soul. As with buried treasures, the ground over them sounds strange
and hollow. At any rate, the profoundest ponderer seldom tells us all
he thinks; seldom reveals to us the ultimate, and the innermost;
seldom makes us open our eyes under water; seldom throws open
the totus-in-toto; and never carries us with him, to the
unconsubsistent, the ideaimmanens, the super-essential, and the One."

Confusion! Remember the Quadammodatatives!"

"Ah!" said Braid-Beard, "that's the crack in his calabash, which all
the Dicibles of Doxdox will not mend."

"And from that crazy calabash he gives us to drink, old Mohi."

"But never heed his leaky gourd nor its contents, my lord. Let these
philosophers muddle themselves as they will, we wise ones refuse to
partake."

"And fools like me drink till they reel," said Babbalanja. "But in
these matters one's calabash must needs go round to keep afloat.
Fogle-orum!"

CHAPTER LXXIII
At Last, The Last Mention Is Made Of Old Bardianna; And His Last Will
And Testament Is Recited At Length

The day was waning. And, as after many a tale of ghosts, around t