And then, as if he suspected my thoughts, he suddenly shifted his key.

“You’ll excuse me, sir,” he whined, “but sometimes I get a little mixed in my head.  I am a very old man; and it is hard to remember everything.”

I knew that he was right, and that I should not try to reconcile him with Roman history; so I asked for news concerning other ancients with whom he had walked familiar.

Above my desk hung an engraving of Raphael’s cherubs.  You could yet make out their forms, though the dust blurred their outlines strangely.

“Ye calls them ’cher-rubs’,” cackled the old man.  “Babes, ye fancy they are, with wings.  And there’s one wid legs and a bow and arrow that ye call Cupid—­I know where they was found.  The great-great-great-grandfather of thim all was a billy-goat.  Bein’ an editor, sir, do ye happen to know where Solomon s Temple stood?”

I fancied that it was in—­in Persia?  Well, I did not know.

“’Tis not in history nor in the Bible where it was.  But I saw it, meself.  The first pictures of cher-rubs and cupids was sculptured upon thim walls and pillars.  Two of the biggest, sir, stood in the adytum to form the baldachin over the Ark.  But the wings of thim sculptures was intindid for horns.  And the faces was the faces of goats.  Ten thousand goats there was in and about the temple.  And your cher-rubs was billy-goats in the days of King Solomon, but the painters misconstrued the horns into wings.

“And I knew Tamerlane, the lame Timour, sir, very well.  I saw him at Keghut and at Zaranj.  He was a little man no larger than yerself, with hair the colour of an amber pipe stem.  They buried him at Samarkand.  I was at the wake, sir.  Oh, he was a fine-built man in his coffin, six feet long, with black whiskers to his face.  And I see ’em throw turnips at the Imperor Vispacian in Africa.  All over the world I have tramped, sir, without the body of me findin’ any rest.  ’Twas so commanded.  I saw Jerusalem destroyed, and Pompeii go up in the fireworks; and I was at the coronation of Charlemagne and the lynchin’ of Joan of Arc.  And everywhere I go there comes storms and revolutions and plagues and fires.  ’Twas so commanded.  Ye have heard of the Wandering Jew.  ’Tis all so, except that divil a bit am I a Jew.  But history lies, as I have told ye.  Are ye quite sure, sir, that ye haven’t a drop of whiskey convenient?  Ye well know that I have many miles of walking before me.”

“I have none,” said I, “and, if you please, I am about to leave for my supper.”

I pushed my chair back creakingly.  This ancient landlubber was becoming as great an affliction as any cross-bowed mariner.  He shook a musty effluvium from his piebald clothes, overturned my inkstand, and went on with his insufferable nonsense.