But you were surely too severe, poor friend of mine. There were just men even in Askelon--upright, religious, and intelligent, full of good works. What if this clever conveyancer had appropriated to himself enough to buy him a fine house? Was it not in the very air of Askelon that he should do such a thing--that he, like others, should at any rate establish himself comfortably? and will not some honester man than himself live after him in the fine house? Come now, confess, I used to say, that you yourself, in his place, might not have done much better: confess, at least, that when you were a boy you put your fingers into the sugar-bowl when you should have kept them out, when you well knew that you ought to keep them out! And then my friend would confess the pressure of the "environment," the power of the "Zeit-Geist," as we have learned to call it since then. Poor man! That was long ago; and things have changed greatly in Askelon of latter years. They tell me that everybody there has now grown honest, and that nobody goes around any more reading invisible writing on the houses. And all the fine buildings are still standing, it appears; though the journals of that city remark that some of the Grecian architecture has peeled off from the fronts of the houses in the Pentodon, having been insecurely fastened on, it seems, at first. And how my poor friend used to criticise those very palaces in his dry, technical way! One thing in particular that he said I remember by the antithesis, the turn of it; he used to say that the architects of Askelon were never certain whether to construct ornament or to ornament construction. Well, he is gone now; he will never blame Askelon again, or run down Gath. He died in Philistia. Perhaps he served his purpose there, but I am sure he would have done more if he had been a little less Quixotic in his notions.