"Perhaps after thousands of years have lapsed," continued Bagoas, "a peasant will find a brick with thy name upon it, and cast it aside, or tread it under foot. But even to-day I have met and spoken with a man in whose horoscope it was written that his name would be remembered while man exists upon the earth; yet he is naked, and his house is a cabin of boughs." "Was it foreshadowed that he would become King?" enquired Merodach anxiously. "No; his inheritance is poverty and pain." "What is his name?" enquired the King. "His name is Adam," answered Bagoas. Then there was a silence in the garden of the King's harem; and Merodach wondered that the memory of one who went naked, and dwelt in a cabin of boughs, should outlast the memory of a King before whom the nations trembled, who went clothed in purple and fine linen, and whose palace was built of thirty-five million bricks. But he consoled himself with the thought that eventually even Adam would be forgotten, and the lights of Sirius and Aldebaran extinguished. "Tell me of Adam," he said to Bagoas; and the Princess Candace drew closer to listen. "Our life, O King, is a series of accidents," said Bagoas. "A little thing is sufficient to divert the whole course of our progress; it has even been said by our philosophers that the world itself is an accident, and that God is chance. I am inclined to believe, being old-fashioned, in Providence; for chance is merely a cause that is imperceptible, and if the deflection of atoms falling through space caused the world, that deflection was the result of some feature peculiar to the atoms themselves. I believe that, if the world were formed in this way, the cause was inherent in the atoms, and I believe that the progress of each man through life is derived from causes inherent in himself. But the operations of the human mind are so far removed from our experience, and so elusive in themselves, that we cannot explain them otherwise than by saying that Bel, by the hands of his angels, puts into man's mind ideas of good or of evil according to the purpose of his inscrutable wisdom. The greater part of man's life is purely spontaneous, sensible rather than reasonable in so far as the majority of our actions do not result from any reflective process, and hence it is unreasonable to ask a man to give reasons for all his acts, as it would be to ask you, O King, to give a reason for your last campaign." "That was a reason of State," said Merodach simply.