kes me a Jew, then everything that comes out of
a bottle is babies' milk. Ye have my name on the card ye hold; and ye
have read the bit of paper they call the _Turkish Spy_ that printed
the news when I stepped into their office on the 12th day of June, in
the year 1643, just as I have called upon ye to-day."

I laid down my pencil and pad. Clearly it would not do. Here was an
item for the local column of the _Bugle_ that--but it would not do.
Still, fragments of the impossible "personal" began to flit through
my conventionalized brain. "Uncle Michob is as spry on his legs as a
young chap of only a thousand or so." "Our venerable caller relates
with pride that George Wash--no, Ptolemy the Great--once dandled him
on his knee at his father's house." "Uncle Michob says that our wet
spring was nothing in comparison with the dampness that ruined the
crops around Mount Ararat when he was a boy--" But no, no--it would
not do.

I was trying to think of some conversational subject with which to
interest my visitor, and was hesitating between walking matches and
the Pliocene age, when the old man suddenly began to weep poignantly
and distressfully.

"Cheer up, Mr. Ader," I said, a little awkwardly; "this matter may
blow over in a few hundred years more. There has already been a
decided reaction in favour of Judas Iscariot and Colonel Burr and the
celebrated violinist, Signor Nero. This is the age of whitewash. You
must not allow yourself to become down-hearted."

Unknowingly, I had struck a chord. The old man blinked belligerently
through his senile tears.

"'Tis time," he said, "that the liars be doin' justice to somebody.
Yer historians are no more than a pack of old women gabblin' at a
wake. A finer man than the Imperor Nero niver wore sandals. Man, I was
at the burnin' of Rome. I knowed the Imperor well, for in them days I
was a well-known char-acter. In thim days they had rayspect for a man
that lived forever.

"But 'twas of the Imperor Nero I was goin' to tell ye. I struck into
Rome, up the Appian Way, on the night of July the 16th, the year 64. I
had just stepped down by way of Siberia and Afghanistan; and one foot
of me had a frost-bite, and the other a blister burned by the sand of
the desert; and I was feelin' a bit blue from doin' patrol duty from
the North Pole down to the Last Chance corner in Patagonia, and bein'
miscalled a Jew in the bargain. Well, I'm tellin' ye I was passin'
the Circus Maximus, and it was