The opera was nearly over when I was accosted by a young man who,
abruptly, and without any introduction, told me that as a stranger--I had
been very wrong in spending two months in Mantua without paying a visit
to the natural history collection belonging to his father, Don Antonio
Capitani, commissary and prebendal president.

"Sir," I answered, "I have been guilty only through ignorance, and if you
would be so good as to call for me at my hotel to-morrow morning, before
the evening I shall have atoned for my error, and you will no longer have
the right to address me the same reproach"

The son of the prebendal commissary called for me, and I found in his
father a most eccentric, whimsical sort of man. The curiosities of his
collection consisted of his family tree, of books of magic, relics, coins
which he believed to be antediluvian, a model of the ark taken from
nature at the time when Noah arrived in that extraordinary harbour, Mount
Ararat, in Armenia. He load several medals, one of Sesostris, another of
Semiramis, and an old knife of a queer shape, covered with rust. Besides
all those wonderful treasures, he possessed, but under lock and key, all
the paraphernalia of freemasonry.

"Pray, tell me," I said to him, "what relation there is between this
collection and natural history? I see nothing here representing the three
kingdoms."

"What! You do not see the antediluvian kingdom, that of Sesostris and
that of Semiramis? Are not those the three kingdoms?"

When I heard that answer I embraced him with an exclamation of delight,
which was sarcastic in its intent, but which he took for admiration, and