“There is a man come to Paris in this year 1643 who pretends to have lived these sixteen hundred years.  He says of himself that he was a shoemaker in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion; that his name is Michob Ader; and that when Jesus, the Christian Messias, was condemned by Pontius Pilate, the Roman president, he paused to rest while bearing his cross to the place of crucifixion before the door of Michob Ader.  The shoemaker struck Jesus with his fist, saying:  ’Go; why tarriest thou?’ The Messias answered him:  ’I indeed am going; but thou shalt tarry until I come’; thereby condemning him to live until the day of judgment.  He lives forever, but at the end of every hundred years he falls into a fit or trance, on recovering from which he finds himself in the same state of youth in which he was when Jesus suffered, being then about thirty years of age.

“Such is the story of the Wandering Jew, as told by Michob Ader, who relates—­” Here the printing ended.

I must have muttered aloud something to myself about the Wandering Jew, for the old man spake up, bitterly and loudly.

“’Tis a lie,” said he, “like nine tenths of what ye call history.  ’Tis a Gentile I am, and no Jew.  I am after footing it out of Jerusalem, my son; but if that makes me a Jew, then everything that comes out of a bottle is babies’ milk.  Ye have my name on the card ye hold; and ye have read the bit of paper they call the Turkish Spy that printed the news when I stepped into their office on the 12th day of June, in the year 1643, just as I have called upon ye to-day.”

I laid down my pencil and pad.  Clearly it would not do.  Here was an item for the local column of the Bugle that—­but it would not do.  Still, fragments of the impossible “personal” began to flit through my conventionalized brain.  “Uncle Michob is as spry on his legs as a young chap of only a thousand or so.”  “Our venerable caller relates with pride that George Wash—­no, Ptolemy the Great—­once dandled him on his knee at his father’s house.”  “Uncle Michob says that our wet spring was nothing in comparison with the dampness that ruined the crops around Mount Ararat when he was a boy—­” But no, no—­it would not do.

I was trying to think of some conversational subject with which to interest my visitor, and was hesitating between walking matches and the Pliocene age, when the old man suddenly began to weep poignantly and distressfully.

“Cheer up, Mr. Ader,” I said, a little awkwardly; “this matter may blow over in a few hundred years more.  There has already been a decided reaction in favour of Judas Iscariot and Colonel Burr and the celebrated violinist, Signor Nero.  This is the age of whitewash.  You must not allow yourself to become down-hearted.”

Unknowingly, I had struck a chord.  The old man blinked belligerently through his senile tears.

“‘Tis time,” he said, “that the liars be doin’ justice to somebody.  Yer historians are no more than a pack of old women gabblin’ at a wake.  A finer man than the Imperor Nero niver wore sandals.  Man, I was at the burnin’ of Rome.  I knowed the Imperor well, for in them days I was a well-known char-acter.  In thim days they had rayspect for a man that lived forever.