pegs, was worthy of some attention, especially the shirt of Nessus,
Caesar's mantle, Joseph's coat of many colors, the Vicar of Bray's
cassock, Goldsmith's peach-bloom suit, a pair of President
Jefferson's scarlet breeches, John Randolph's red baize
hunting-shirt, the drab small-clothes of the Stout Gentleman, and the
rags of the "man all tattered and torn." George Fox's hat impressed
me with deep reverence as a relic of perhaps the truest apostle that
has appeared on earth for these eighteen hundred years. My eye was
next attracted by an old pair of shears, which I should have taken
for a memorial of some famous tailor, only that the virtuoso pledged
his veracity that they were the identical scissors of Atropos. He
also showed me a broken hourglass which had been thrown aside by
Father Time, together with the old gentleman's gray forelock,
tastefully braided into a brooch. In the hour-glass was the handful
of sand, the grains of which had numbered the years of the Cumeean
sibyl. I think it was in this alcove that I saw the inkstand which
Luther threw at the Devil, and the ring which Essex, while under
sentence of death, sent to Queen Elizabeth. And here was the
blood-incrusted pen of steel with which Faust signed away his
salvation.

The virtuoso now opened the door of a closet and showed me a lamp
burning, while three others stood unlighted by its side. One of the
three was the lamp of Diogenes, another that of Guy Fawkes, and the
third that which Hero set forth to the midnight breeze in the high
tower of Ahydos.

"See!" said the virtuoso, blowing with all his force at the lighted
lamp.