om Homer
down to myself have got up an Authors' Club where we have a lovely
time talking about ourselves, no man to be eligible who hasn't written
something that has lasted a hundred years. Perhaps, if you are thinking
of coming over soon, you'll let me put you on our waiting-list?"

I smiled at his seeming inconsistency and let myself into his snare.

"I haven't written anything that has lasted a hundred years yet," said
I.

"Oh, yes, I think you have," replied Boswell, and the machine seemed to
laugh as he wrote out his answer. "I saw a joke of yours the other day
that's two hundred centuries old. Diogenes showed it to me and said that
it was a great favorite with his grandfather, who had inherited it from
one of his remote ancestors."

A hot retort was on my lips, but I had no wish to offend my guest, so
I smiled and observed that I had frequently indulged in unconscious
plagiarism of that sort.

"I should imagine," I hastened to add, "that to men like Charles the
First this uncertainty as to the safety of Cromwell would be great joy."

"I hardly know," returned Boswell. "That very question has been
discussed among us. Charles made a great outward show of grief when
he heard of the coal being delivered at the office of the Minister of
Justice, and we all thought him quite magnanimous, but it leaked out,
just before I left to come here, that he sent his private secretary to
the palace with a Panama hat and a palm-leaf fan for Cromwell, with his
congratulations.

"That seems to savor somewhat of sarcasm."

"Oh, ultimately Hades is bound to be a republic," replied Boswell.
"There are too many clever and ambitious politicians among us for the
place to go along as a despotism much longer. If the place were filled
up with poets and society people, and things like that, it might go on
as an autocracy forever, but you see it isn't. To men of the caliber
of Alexander the Great and Bonaparte and Caesar, and a thousand other
warriors who never were used to taking orders from anybody, but were
themselves headquarters, the despotic sway of Apollyon is intolerable,
and he hasn't made any effort to conciliate any of them. If he had
appointed Bonaparte commander-in-chief of his army and made a friend of
him, instead of ordering him to be hanged every month for 415,000 years,
or put Caesar in as Secretary of State, instead of having him roasted
three times a month for seventy or eighty centuries, he would have
strengthened