"You find Adam's standard of good and evil laughable," he said. "It is in fact a little comic, but human, quite human, and quite logical. He says in effect: 'I, Adam, am good; those who differ from me, differ from what is good, and are consequently evil.' This position, which we find so laughable in others, is really common to us all; only, unfortunately, a sense of humour is a sense which we never apply to ourselves. Who will deny that Adam is wise in limiting his desires to such things as lie easily within his reach, if happiness be the end of wisdom? The earth gives him of her fulness, the climate of his valley is mild and temperate, snow does not fall there nor is it vexed by winds; the misery of his fellows is hidden from him, he is without care for the morrow; in limiting his desires he has extended the possibilities of delight, and joy comes to him unexpectedly as if it were a miracle wrought by God." "A charming life!" exclaimed the Queen. "Your barbarians are like children." "Yes; they are like children," answered Bagoas. "In fact they still are children, and so I have treated them. I cast Adam's horoscope, and read therein the wonderful things which the stars ordain for him. In this horoscope I read that Adam is to be the father of a race which shall revolutionise the world; a little obstinate people inhabiting a country in the west toward the sea; a people of slaves, outraged and despised, yet leavening all the peoples among whom they dwell. It is this race of slaves that will pass on the light and wisdom of Chaldæa to nations as yet unborn. While thy monuments, O King, are sleeping beneath the drifted sands of the desert, the name of Adam will pass from tongue to tongue, and distant peoples will come to think of him as the father of the whole human race. The arts and sciences of Uruk will be forgotten, and the world will be duped by a record of events which never happened, myths and legends stolen from surrounding nations and woven into a curious asymmetrical whole, full of contradictions and puerilities. "Truly in Adam's horoscope everything is a contradiction. From being the happiest man, he will become the most miserable; after a life spent in obscurity he will achieve almost an eternity of fame, and his children, a race of slaves, will impose their law upon the world for nearly two thousand years. It is incredible. Surely my meditation as I rode toward him was not without cause. Our wisdom, the science of Chaldæa, is the miser's gold which shall be lost in the earth, and whatever of us survives in the memory of man will survive through the children of Adam. I told him nothing of this, but prophesied that he would be a wanderer until his death, at which he smiled. "'That may not be,' he said; 'because God has put me into this garden to dress it and keep it.'