Aunt Clarissa started so violently that her eyeglasses fell from her aquiline nose to the end of their chain.

“Good heavens, child!  I didn’t know you were there.  What did you say?”

“I said there were five thousand six hundred and seventeen books on the shelves here yesterday.”

“How do you know?”

“I counted them.”

“Counted them?  Mercy!  What for?”

Galusha’s spectacles gleamed.  “For fun,” he said.

On another occasion his aunt found him still poring over Ancient Nineveh and Its Remains; it was the fifth volume now, however.

“Do you like to read that?” she asked.

“Yes, Auntie.  I’ve read four already and, counting this one, there are five more to read.”

Now Aunt Clarissa had never read Ancient Nineveh herself.  Her bookseller had assured her that it was a very remarkable set, quite rare and complete.  “We seldom pick one up nowadays, Mrs. Bute.  You should buy it.”  So Aunt Clarissa bought it, but she had never thought of reading it.

She looked down over her nephew’s shoulder at the broad page with its diagram of an ancient temple and its drawings of human-headed bulls in bas-relief.

“Why do you find it so interesting?” she asked.

Galusha looked up at her.  His eyes were alight with excitement.

“They dig those things up over there,” he said, pointing to one of the bulls.  “It’s all sand and rocks—­and everything, but they send an expedition and the people in it figure out where the city or the temple or whatever it is ought to be, and then they dig and—­and find it.  And you can’t tell what you’ll find, exactly.  And sometimes you don’t find much of anything.”

“After all the digging and work?”

“Yes, but that’s where the fun comes in.  Then you figure all over again and keep on trying and trying.  And when you do find ’em there are sculptures like this—­oh, yards and yards of ’em—­and all sort of queer, funny old inscriptions to be studied out.  Gee, it must be great!  Don’t you think so, Auntie?”

Aunt Clarissa’s reply was noncommittal.  That evening she wrote a letter to Augustus Cabot in Boston.  “He is a good boy,” she wrote, referring to Galusha, “but queer—­oh, dreadfully queer.  It’s his father’s queerness cropping out, of course, but it shouldn’t be permitted to develop.  I have set my heart on his becoming a financier like the other Galushas in our line.  Of course he will always be a Bangs—­more’s the pity—­but his middle name is Cabot and his first is Galusha.  I think he had best continue his schooling in or near Boston where you can influence him, Augustus.  I wish him well grounded in mathematics and—­oh, you understand, the financial branches.  Select a school, the right sort of school, for him, to oblige me, will you, Gus?”