—­This is a good instance of the way in which Number Seven’s squinting brain works.  You will now and then meet just such brains in heads you know very well.  Their owners are much given to asking unanswerable questions.  A physicist may settle it for us whether there is an atmosphere about a planet or not, but it takes a brain with an extra fissure in it to ask these unexpected questions,—­questions which the natural philosopher cannot answer, and which the theologian never thinks of asking.

The company at our table do not keep always in the same places.  The first thing I noticed, the other evening, was that the Tutor was sitting between the two Annexes, and the Counsellor was next to Number Five.  Something ought to come of this arrangement.  One of those two young ladies must certainly captivate and perhaps capture the Tutor.  They are just the age to be falling in love and to be fallen in love with.  The Tutor is good looking, intellectual, suspected of writing poetry, but a little shy, it appears to me.  I am glad to see him between the two girls.  If there were only one, she might be shy too, and then there would be less chance for a romance such as I am on the lookout for; but these young persons lend courage to each other, and between them, if he does not wake up like Cymon at the sight of Iphigenia, I shall be disappointed.  As for the Counsellor and Number Five, they will soon find each other out.  Yes, it is all pretty clear in my mind,—­except that there is always an x in a problem where sentiments are involved.  No, not so clear about the Tutor.  Predestined, I venture my guess, to one or the other, but to which?  I will suspend my opinion for the present.

I have found out that the Counsellor is a childless widower.  I am told that the Tutor is unmarried, and so far as known not engaged.  There is no use in denying it,—­a company without the possibility of a love-match between two of its circle is like a champagne bottle with the cork out for some hours as compared to one with its pop yet in reserve.  However, if there should be any love-making, it need not break up our conversations.  Most of it will be carried on away from our tea-table.

Some of us have been attending certain lectures on Egypt and its antiquities.  I have never been on the Nile.  If in any future state there shall be vacations in which we may have liberty to revisit our old home, equipped with a complete brand-new set of mortal senses as our travelling outfit, I think one of the first places I should go to, after my birthplace, the old gambrel-roofed house,—­the place where it stood, rather,—­would be that mighty, awe-inspiring river.  I do not suppose we shall ever know half of what we owe to the wise and wonderful people who confront us with the overpowering monuments of a past which flows out of the unfathomable darkness as the great river streams from sources even as yet but imperfectly explored.

I have thought a good deal about Egypt, lately, with reference to our historical monuments.  How did the great unknown mastery who fixed the two leading forms of their monumental records arrive at those admirable and eternal types, the pyramid and the obelisk?  How did they get their model of the pyramid?