arrangement of its dolls. We will smile superior, to see what a facile
thing it is to make a people happy. In our reign of a hundred years, we
shall have time to extinguish errors, and make the world see the absurdity
of them; to substitute other methods of government for the old, bad ones;
to fit the people to govern itself, to do with little government, to do
with none; and when this is effected, we will vanish from our loving
people, and be seen no more, but be reverenced as gods,--we, meanwhile,
being overlooked, and smiling to ourselves, amid the very crowd that is
looking for us."

"I intend," said Sibyl, making this wild talk wilder by that petulance
which she so often showed,--"I intend to introduce a new fashion of dress
when I am queen, and that shall be my part of the great reform which you
are going to make. And for my crown, I intend to have it of flowers, in
which that strange crimson one shall be the chief; and when I vanish, this
flower shall remain behind, and perhaps they shall have a glimpse of me
wearing it in the crowd. Well, what next?"

"After this," said Septimius, "having seen so much of affairs, and having
lived so many hundred years, I will sit down and write a history, such as
histories ought to be, and never have been. And it shall be so wise, and
so vivid, and so self-evidently true, that people shall be convinced from
it that there is some undying one among them, because only an eye-witness
could have written it, or could have gained so much wisdom as was needful
for it."

"And for my part in the history," said Sibyl, "I will record the various
lengths of women's waists, and the fashion of their sleeves. What next?"

"By this time," said Septimius,--"how many hundred years have we now