Twenty years ago Merman was a young man of promise, a conveyancer with a practice which had certainly budded, but, like Aaron’s rod, seemed not destined to proceed further in that marvellous activity.  Meanwhile he occupied himself in miscellaneous periodical writing and in a multifarious study of moral and physical science.  What chiefly attracted him in all subjects were the vexed questions which have the advantage of not admitting the decisive proof or disproof that renders many ingenious arguments superannuated.  Not that Merman had a wrangling disposition:  he put all his doubts, queries, and paradoxes deferentially, contended without unpleasant heat and only with a sonorous eagerness against the personality of Homer, expressed himself civilly though firmly on the origin of language, and had tact enough to drop at the right moment such subjects as the ultimate reduction of all the so-called elementary substances, his own total scepticism concerning Manetho’s chronology, or even the relation between the magnetic condition of the earth and the outbreak of revolutionary tendencies.  Such flexibility was naturally much helped by his amiable feeling towards woman, whose nervous system, he was convinced, would not bear the continuous strain of difficult topics; and also by his willingness to contribute a song whenever the same desultory charmer proposed music.  Indeed his tastes were domestic enough to beguile him into marriage when his resources were still very moderate and partly uncertain.  His friends wished that so ingenious and agreeable a fellow might have more prosperity than they ventured to hope for him, their chief regret on his account being that he did not concentrate his talent and leave off forming opinions on at least half-a-dozen of the subjects over which he scattered his attention, especially now that he had married a “nice little woman” (the generic name for acquaintances’ wives when they are not markedly disagreeable).  He could not, they observed, want all his various knowledge and Laputan ideas for his periodical writing which brought him most of his bread, and he would do well to use his talents in getting a speciality that would fit him for a post.  Perhaps these well-disposed persons were a little rash in presuming that fitness for a post would be the surest ground for getting it; and on the whole, in now looking back on their wishes for Merman, their chief satisfaction must be that those wishes did not contribute to the actual result.

For in an evil hour Merman did concentrate himself.  He had for many years taken into his interest the comparative history of the ancient civilisations, but it had not preoccupied him so as to narrow his generous attention to everything else.  One sleepless night, however (his wife has more than once narrated to me the details of an event memorable to her as the beginning of sorrows), after spending some hours over the epoch-making work of Grampus, a new idea seized him with regard to the possible connection of certain symbolic monuments common to widely scattered races.  Merman started up in bed.  The night was cold, and the sudden withdrawal of warmth made his wife first dream of a snowball, and then cry—­