_Mercury._--Gentlemen, we here offer you a professor of the very best and most select description. Who buys? Who wants to be a cut above the rest of the world? Who wants to understand the harmonies of the universe and to live two lives? _Customer (turning the philosopher round and examining him)._--He’s not bad to look at. What does he know best? _Mercury._--Arithmetic, astronomy, prognostics, geometry, music, and conjuring. You’ve a first-rate soothsayer before you. _Customer._--May one ask him a few questions? _Mercury._--Certainly--(_aside_), and much good may the answers do you. _Customer._--What country do you come from? _Pythagoras._--Samos. _Customer._--Where were you educated? _Pythagoras._--In Egypt, among the wise men there. _Customer._--Suppose I buy you, now, what will you teach me? _Pythagoras._--I will teach you nothing--only recall things to your memory. _Customer._--How will you do that? _Pythagoras._--First, I will clean out your mind, and wash out all the rubbish. _Customer._--Well, suppose that done, how do you proceed to refresh the memory? _Pythagoras._--First, by long repose and silence, speaking no word for five whole years. _Customer._--Why, look ye, my good fellow, you’d best go teach the dumb son of Crœsus! I want to talk and not be a dummy. Well--but after this silence, and these five years? _Pythagoras._--You shall learn music and geometry. _Customer._--A queer idea, that one must be a fiddler before one can be a wise man! _Pythagoras._--Then you shall learn the science of numbers. _Customer._--Thank you, but I know how to count already. _Pythagoras._--How do you count? _Customer._--One, two, three, four---- _Pythagoras._--Ha! what you call four is ten, and the perfect triangle, and the great oath by which we swear. _Customer._--Now, so help me, the great ten and four, I never heard more divine or more wonderful words! _Pythagoras._--And afterwards, stranger, you shall learn about Earth, and Air, and Water, and Fire--what is their action, and what their form, and what their motion. _Customer._--What! have Fire, Air, or Water bodily shape? _Pythagoras._--Surely they have; else, without form and shape, how could they move! Besides, you shall learn that the Deity consists in Number, Mind, and Harmony. _Customer._--What you say is really wonderful. _Pythagoras._--Besides what I have just told you, you shall understand that you yourself, who seem to be one individual, are really somebody else. _Customer._--What! do you mean to say I’m somebody else, and not myself, now talking to you? _Pythagoras._--Just at this moment you are; but once upon a time you appeared in another body, and under another name; and hereafter you will pass again into another shape still. (After a little more discussion of this philosopher’s tenets, he is purchased on behalf of a company of professors from Magna Græca for ten minæ. The next lot is Diogenes, the Cynic.)