“Yes. Well, six thousand years ago it was a seaport, and the sanctuary of the Chaldean god, Eâ. Now, it is a dust-heap, miles inland. A friend of mine, sorting among the rubbish last year, found a tomb. The gentleman buried therein must have been an Akkadian antiquary, who hated, even in death, to be parted from his treasures, because the brick vault containing his remains also held a variety of objects several thousand years older than himself.” “Are the facts quite clear?” “Clear. Just listen to the evidence. You, as a bloated Britisher, are aware, no doubt, that the year when it first attained the dignity of record began with the vernal equinox, and the opening month was named after the ‘propitious Bull’? Thus, Bull headed the twelve constellations of the zodiac, and was quite an important character. Well, in the tomb aforesaid, the excavators found a small stone urn, bearing, not Taurus, the Bull’s sign, but Aquarius, the water-carrier. The sun, at the vernal equinox, has been in Aries since 2,500 B.C., and it first entered Taurus somewhere about 4,700 B.C. Lots of centuries must have been passed in observation before the astrologers formed the calendar we use to-day, so the urn could claim, at the very least, a venerable antiquity, unless it was a hoary Chaldean hoax. There is a good reason to believe it was anything but a joke. It was brought to Washington, eagerly examined by a gathering of archæologists, and dropped by some trembling enthusiast on to a marble floor.” “Good gracious!” “Yes, the finder said something like that. Indeed, his language was even more fluent. Yet the accident led to a discovery. The shattered urn consisted of two vessels, one within the other. Between the two was a thin slip of ivory, and on this was a cuneiform inscription, with a lively drawing showing how one gentleman hammered a big nail into another gentleman’s skull.” “Do you propose to treat me in that way?” “I have reached my point now. That record of a crime, probably a murder of revenge, was kept secret for at least 7,000 years, and only Schliemann or Haynes could tell us how much longer. So your peculiarly constituted brain, my friend, has gone on repeating itself through many a forgotten ancestor until the accident of environment enabled its hidden recesses to burst their bonds. It took a great many clever men a great many years to decipher the cuneiform characters of the Akkadians, and you will probably be dead long before some genius yet unborn tells an anxious world why you can see things that are taking place at a distance of over three thousand miles. Meanwhile, behold in me your patient observer and chronicler. To-night--”