originally been formed in the United States for the
making of money and the defiance of the heavenly bodies. May bulls and
bears destroy him!"

"Well, it's very odd," said Lady Enid. "Very odd indeed."

As she spoke she glanced at the Prophet and met his eyes. There are
moments when the mere expression in another person's eyes seems to shout
a request at one. The expression in the Prophet's eyes performed this
feat at this moment, with such abrupt vehemence, that Lady Enid felt
almost deafened. She leaned back in her chair, as if avoiding a missile,
and exclaimed,--

"Of course! And I never guessed it!"

"Guessed what, my dear?" inquired Mrs. Merillia.

"Why, that--he--it--was a company," replied Lady Enid.

The Prophet blessed and thanked her with a piercing and saved look.

"Nor I," he assented, descending into the very mine of subterfuge for
his recent oath's sake, "nor I, or I should never have taken the useless
trouble that I have taken."

He managed to say this with such conviction that his grandmother,
who, in the past, had always found him to be transparently honest and
sincere, was carried away by the deception. She wrinkled her long nose,
as was her habit when sincerely pleased, and cried gaily,--

"Then, Hennessey, now you've heard Sir Tiglath's opinion of the practice
of trying to turn the stars into money-makers, and the planets into old
gipsy women who tell fortunes to silly servant girls, I'm sure you'll
never study them again. Come, promise me!"

The Prophet made no answer.

"Hennessey," cried his grandmother, with tender pertinacity, "promise
me! Sir Tiglath, join your voice to mine!"

Sir Tiglath had become really grave, not theatrically serious.

"Young man," he said, "your revered granddam asks of you a righteous
thing. Who are you to trifle with those shining worlds that make a
beauty of the night and that stir eternity in the soul of man? Who are
you to glue your pinpoint of a human eye to yonder machine and play with
the stupendous Jupiter and Saturn as a child plays with marbles or with
peg-tops? Who are you that thinks those glittering monsters have nothing
to do but to inform your pigmy brain of snowfalls, street accidents,
and love-affairs prematurely, so that you may flaunt about your
pocket-handkerchief of a square pluming your dwarfship that you are a
prophet? Fie, young man, and again fie! Bow the knee, as I do, to the
mysteries of the great universal scheme, instead of bot