then be so experienced that all riches will be easy for us to get; with
rich furniture, pictures, statues, and all royal ornaments; and side by
side with this life we will have a little cottage, and see which is the
happiest, for this has always been a dispute. For this century we will
neither toil nor spin, nor think of anything beyond the day that is
passing over us. There is time enough to do all that we have to do."

"A hundred years of play! Will not that be tiresome?" said Sibyl.

"If it is," said Septimius, "the next century shall make up for it; for
then we will contrive deep philosophies, take up one theory after another,
and find out its hollowness and inadequacy, and fling it aside, the rotten
rubbish that they all are, until we have strewn the whole realm of human
thought with the broken fragments, all smashed up. And then, on this great
mound of broken potsherds (like that great Monte Testaccio, which we will
go to Rome to see), we will build a system that shall stand, and by which
mankind shall look far into the ways of Providence, and find practical
uses of the deepest kind in what it has thought merely speculation. And
then, when the hundred years are over, and this great work done, we will
still be so free in mind, that we shall see the emptiness of our own
theory, though men see only its truth. And so, if we like more of this
pastime, then shall another and another century, and as many more as we
like, be spent in the same way."

"And after that another play-day?" asked Sibyl Dacy.

"Yes," said Septimius, "only it shall not be called so; for the next
century we will get ourselves made rulers of the earth; and knowing men so
well, and having so wrought our theories of government and what not, we
will proceed to execute them,--which will be as easy to us as a child's