"But you must not suppose that I have always been poor. I have had my periods of wealth, but, as I explained to you before, it was very difficult, on account of the frequent necessity of changing my place of residence, as well as my identity, to carry over my property from one set of conditions to another. However, I have often been able to do this, and at one time I was in comfortable circumstances for nearly two hundred years. But generally, when I found myself obliged to leave a place where I had been living, for fear of suspicion concerning my age, I had to leave everything behind me. "I will tell you a little story about one of my attempts, to provide for the future. It was toward the end of the fifteenth century, about the time that Columbus set out on his first voyage of discovery,--and you would be surprised, considering the important results of his voyage, to know how little sensation it caused in Europe,--that I devised a scheme by which I thought I might establish for myself a permanent fortune. I was then living in Genoa, and was carrying on the same business in which I am now engaged. I was a broker, a dealer in money and commercial paper. I was prosperous and well able to carry out the plan I had formed. This plan was a simple one. I would purchase jewels, things easily carried about or concealed, and which would be valuable in any country or any age; and with this idea in my mind I spent many years in collecting valuable stones and jewels, confining myself generally to rings, for I wished to make the bulk of my treasures very small when compared with their value. "About the middle of the sixteenth century I went to Rome, and took my jewels with me. They were then a wonderfully fine collection of gems, some of them of great antiquity and value; for, in gradually gathering them together, the enthusiasm of the collector had possessed me, and I often traveled far to possess myself of a valuable jewel of which I had heard. I remained in Rome as long as I dared do so, and then prepared to set out for Egypt, which I had not visited for a long time, and where I expected to find interesting though depressing changes. I concluded, naturally enough, that it would be dangerous for me to take my treasures with me, and I could conceive of no place where it would be better to leave them than in the Eternal City. Rome was central and comparatively easy of access from any part of the world, and, moreover, was less liable to changes than any other place; so I determined to leave my treasures in Rome, and to put them somewhere where they were not likely to be disturbed by the march of improvement, by the desolations of war and conquest, or to become lost to me by the action of nature. I decided to bury them in the catacombs. With these ancient excavations I was familiar, and I believed that in their dark and mysterious recesses I could conceal my jewels, and that I could find them again when I wanted them.