Today's Stichomancy for Clint Eastwood

There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever been anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive, too nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood him, he said. He had never had a real friend in the world, I think; he had never had a success. He had shirked games and failed examinations. 'It's like that with some people,' he said; 'whenever I got into the examination-room or anywhere everything seemed to go.' Engaged to be married of course--to another over-sensitive person, I suppose--when the indiscretion with the gas escape ended his affairs. 'And where are you now?' I asked. 'Not in--?'

"He!" said the victim to himself, "HE to prevent the Baron de Listomere from becoming peer of France!--and, perhaps, 'by the help of the archbishop we may be able to stop the matter here'!"

In presence of such great interests Birotteau felt he was a mere worm; he judged himself harshly.

The news of Birotteau's removal from Madame de Listomere's house seemed all the more amazing because the reason of it was wholly impenetrable. Madame de Listomere said that her nephew was intending to marry and leave the navy, and she wanted the vicar's apartment to enlarge her own. Birotteau's relinquishment was still unknown. The advice of Monsieur de Bourbonne was followed. Whenever the two facts

moment to step beneath a lighted shrine with his letter.

"I am in dreadful trouble and implore your help. Polixena"--he read; but hardly had he seized the sense of the words when a hand fell on his shoulder, and a stern-looking man in a cocked hat, and bearing a kind of rod or mace, pronounced a few words in Venetian.

Tony, with a start, thrust the letter in his breast, and tried to jerk himself free; but the harder he jerked the tighter grew the other's grip, and the Count, presently perceiving what had happened, pushed his way through the crowd, and whispered hastily to his companion: "For God's sake, make no struggle. This is

as involved in the possibility of good, and incident to the mixed state of man.

Once more--and this is the point of connexion with the rest of the dialogue--the myth is intended to bring out the difference between the ideal and the actual state of man. In all ages of the world men have dreamed of a state of perfection, which has been, and is to be, but never is, and seems to disappear under the necessary conditions of human society. The uselessness, the danger, the true value of such political ideals have often been discussed; youth is too ready to believe in them; age to disparage them. Plato's 'prudens quaestio' respecting the comparative happiness of men in this and in a former cycle of existence is intended to

Statesman