Are you following me ?" "I follow every word with the closest attention." "You must know, then, that I had first found out some fragments of the old rhyme in which the prophecy occurs quoted as a curiosity in an antiquarian book in the library.

On the page opposite this quotation had been pasted a rude old wood-cut, representing a dark-haired man, whose face was so strangely like what I remembered of my Uncle Stephen that the portrait absolutely startled me.

When I asked my father about this--it was then just before his death--he either knew, or pretended to know, nothing of it; and when I afterward mentioned the prediction he fretfully changed the subject.

It was just the same with our chaplain when I spoke to him.

He said the portrait had been done centuries before my uncle was born, and called the prophecy doggerel and nonsense.