Page:Nine Unlikely Tales.djvu/103

Rh “Dear me,” said old Tony. “Poor old Henry Birkbeck, it seems like yesterday; yes, he was very respectable, but only in a small way of business. A magician he was by trade, but no one thought much of him, except perhaps the King, and he never gave him a lift. He used to do things with eggs and a hat. He broke the eggs as often as not. And the goldfish and handkerchief he hardly ever brought off.”

Old Tony began to lay down the tombstone, but young Tony held it up with one hand and tried to scrape the back of it with the other.

“There’s something here,” he said, “let’s set it upright instead of laying it down, and I will scrub it and see what the letters are. Poor old Mr. Birkbeck, I wonder what his last foretelling was. Was he good at prophesying, grandfather?”

“Not a bit,” said the sexton, “and to do him justice he almost gave it up in his later years. You see people laughed at him so, because the things that he foretold never happened. Towards the end he grew very feeble—hardly prophesied a single prophecy from one year’s end to another. Sometimes he would say, ‘I should not wonder if it rained before Sunday,’ but then he never wondered