Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/40

 Spirituous gift to see in the crystal: if she had that, she might make your fortune."

WAIFE (with a 'sudden change of countenance).—"Ah! I never thought of that. But if she has not the gift, I could teach it her,—eh?"

COBBLER (indignantly).—"I did not think to hear this from you, Mr. Waife. Teach her,—you! make her an impostor, and of the wickedest kind, inventing lies between earth and them as dwell in the seven spheres! Fie! No, if she hasn't the gift natural, let her alone: what here is not heaven-sent is devil-taught."

WAIFE (awed, but dubious).—"Then you really think you saw all that you described, in that glass egg?"

COBBLER.—"Think!--am I a liar? I spoke truth, and the proof is—there—!" Rat-tat went the knocker at the door.

"The two minutes are just up," said the Cobbler; and Cornelius Agrippa could not have said it with more wizardly effect.

"They are come, indeed," said Sophy, re-entering the room softly: "I hear their voices at the threshold."

The Cobbler passed by in silence, descended the stairs, and conducted Vance and Lionel into the Comedian's chamber; there he left them, his brow overcast. Gentleman Waife had displeased him sorely.

CHAPTER VIII.

Showing the arts by which a man, however high in the air Nature may have formed his nose, may be led by that nose, and in directions perversely opposite to those which, in following his nose, he might be supposed to take; and, therefore, that nations the most liberally endowed with practical good sense, and in conceit thereof, carrying their noses the most horizontally aloof, when they come into conference with nations more skilled in diplomacy and more practised in "stage-play," end by the surrender of the precise object which it was intended they should surrender before they laid their noses together.

We all know that Demosthenes said, Everything in oratory was acting,—stage-play. Is it in oratory alone that the saying holds good? Apply it to all circumstances of fife, "stage-play, stage-play, stage-play!"—only _ars est celare artem_, conceal the art. Gleesome in soul to behold his visitors, calculating already on the three pounds to be extracted from them, seeing