But no, these are not the people who are anxious to catch the pearls which drop from his mouth.  Do statesmen and diplomatists, then, listen to him who can unravel for them the policies of the Past?  Do business men hasten from Threadneedle Street and Wall Street to sit at his feet, that they may have instilled into them a little of the romance of ancient money?  I fear not.

Come with me to some provincial town, where this day Professor Blank is to deliver one of his archaeological lectures at the Town Hall.  We are met at the door by the secretary of the local archaeological society:  a melancholy lady in green plush, who suffers from St Vitus’s dance.  Gloomily we enter the hall and silently accept the seats which are indicated to us by an unfortunate gentleman with a club-foot.  In front of us an elderly female with short hair is chatting to a very plain young woman draped like a lay figure.  On the right an emaciated man with a very bad cough shuffles on his chair; on the left two old grey-beards grumble to one another about the weather, a subject which leads up to the familiar “Mine catches me in the small of the back”; while behind us the inevitable curate, of whose appearance it would be trite to speak, describes to an astonished old lady the recent discovery of the pelvis of a mastodon.

The professor and the aged chairman step on to the platform; and, amidst the profoundest gloom, the latter rises to pronounce the prefatory rigmarole.  “Archaeology,” he says, in a voice of brass, “is a science which bars its doors to all but the most erudite; for, to the layman who has not been vouchsafed the opportunity of studying the dusty volumes of the learned, the bones of the dead will not reveal their secrets, nor will the crumbling pediments of naos and cenotaph, the obliterated tombstones, or the worm-eaten parchments, tell us their story.  To-night, however, we are privileged; for Professor Blank will open the doors for us that we may gaze for a moment upon that solemn charnel-house of the Past in which he has sat for so many long hours of inductive meditation.”

And the professor by his side, whose head, perhaps, was filled with the martial music of the long-lost hosts of the Lord, or before whose eyes there swayed the entrancing forms of the dancing-girls of Babylon, stares horrified from chairman to audience.  He sees crabbed old men and barren old women before him, afflicted youths and fatuous maidens; and he realises at once that the golden keys which he possesses to the gates of the treasury of the jewelled Past will not open the doors of that charnel-house which they desire to be shown.  The scent of the king’s roses fades from his nostrils, the Egyptian music which throbbed in his ears is hushed, the glorious illumination of the Palace of a Thousand Columns is extinguished; and in the gathering gloom we leave him fumbling with a rusty key at the mildewed door of the Place of Bones.