"Cannot say that I - "

"Indeed! - why it was I who told Aristotle that by sneezing, men expelled superfluous ideas through the proboscis."

"Which is - hiccup! - undoubtedly the case," said the metaphysician, while he poured out for himself another bumper of Mousseux, and offered his snuff-box to the fingers of his visiter.

"There was Plato, too," continued his Majesty, modestly declining the snuff-box and the compliment it implied - "there was Plato, too, for whom I, at one time, felt all the affection of a friend. You knew Plato, Bon-Bon? - ah, no, I beg a thousand pardons. He met me at Athens , one day, in the Parthenon, and told me he was distressed for an idea. I bade him write, down that o nous estin aulos. He said that he would do so, and went home, while I stepped over to the pyramids. But my conscience smote me for having uttered a truth, even to aid a friend, and hastening back to Athens , I arrived behind the philosopher's chair as he was inditing the 'aulos.'"

"Giving the lambda a fillip with my finger, I turned it upside down. So the sentence now read 'o nous estin augos', and is, you perceive, the fundamental doctrines in his metaphysics."

"Were you ever at Rome ?" asked the restaurateur, as he finished his second bottle of Mousseux, and drew from the closet a larger supply of Chambertin.

But once, Monsieur Bon-Bon, but once. There was a time," said the devil, as if reciting some passage from a book - "there was a time when occurred an anarchy of five years, during which the republic, bereft of all its officers, had no magistracy besides the tribunes of the people, and these were not legally vested with any degree of executive power - at that time, Monsieur Bon-Bon - at that time only I was in Rome, and I have no earthly acquaintance, consequently, with any of its philosophy."*