Old Tony was beadle and sexton and keeper of the town records; and very nicely he kept them too. There was not a speck of dirt on one of them. He used to spend hours and hours polishing the records, and he scoured the tombstones till they shone again; and he had most of the inscriptions by heart. After an earthquake he was always most careful to put the tombstones back in their proper places, and one day, when he was doing this, he came on a stone he did not remember to have seen before. He called to young Tony, who had had a Board School education, to see if he could read the bits of words that were carved upon it. “It seems like a foreign language,” said he. “I can’t make it out,” said young Tony, “it is not carved, it is in the stone somehow. Looks as if it were coming through from the other side.” He turned the stone over, and there, on the other side, was an inscription which both of them had read a hundred times. “HERE LIES HENRY BIRKBECK, MAGICIAN TO THE INSTITUTE, However humble he seems to you, His last foretelling is going to come true. P.S.—You see if it doesn’t.” “Dear me,” said old Tony. “Poor old Henry Birkbeck, it seems like yesterday; yes, he was very respectable, but only in a small way of business. A magician he was by trade, but no one thought much of him, except perhaps the King, and _he_ never gave him a lift. He used to do things with eggs and a hat. He broke the eggs as often as not. And the goldfish and handkerchief he hardly ever brought off.” Old Tony began to lay down the tombstone, but young Tony held it up with one hand and tried to scrape the back of it with the other. “There’s something here,” he said, “let’s set it upright instead of laying it down, and I will scrub it and see what the letters are. Poor old Mr. Birkbeck, I wonder what his last foretelling was. Was he good at prophesying, grandfather?” “Not a bit,” said the sexton, “and to do him justice he almost gave it up in his later years. You see people laughed at him so, because the things that he foretold never happened. Towards the end he grew very feeble—hardly prophesied a single prophecy from one year’s end to another. Sometimes he would say, ‘I should not wonder if it rained before Sunday,’ but then he never wondered at anything. He was a calm old man, was poor Henry. It took a good deal to astonish him.” Young Tony tried to interest his boy friends in the back of poor old Henry Birkbeck’s tombstone, but nobody cared. They were all in too much of a hurry to care for an occupation so slow as cleaning tombstones, but Tony worked away perseveringly. He cleaned it with soap, and he cleaned it with soda, with brickdust and vinegar, with rotten stone and washleather, with patience and elbow grease, and the last two, as you know, will clean almost anything. So after a time a few letters began to show distinctly here and there, and presently Tony found he could read whole words.