Today's Stichomancy for David Beckham

The rayed white shaft plays over our heads like magic, And to and fro we move and lean and change . . . You, in a world grown strange, Laugh at a darkness, clench your hands despairing, Smash your glass on a floor, no longer caring, Sink suddenly down and cry . . . You hear the applause that greets your latest rival, You are forgotten: your rival--who knows?--is I . . . I laugh in the warm bright light of answering laughter, I am inspired and young . . . and though I see You sitting alone there, dark, with shut eyes crying,

and cornfields of small extent, but bounded and divided with hedgerow timber of great age and size. There were few marks of modern improvement. The environs of the place intimated neither the solitude of decay nor the bustle of novelty; the houses were old, but in good repair; and the beautiful little river murmured freely on its way to the left of the town, neither restrained by a dam nor bordered by a towing-path.

Upon a gentle eminence, nearly a mile to the southward of the town, were seen, amongst many venerable oaks and tangled thickets, the turrets of a castle as old as the walls of York and Lancaster, but which seemed to have received important

sovereign's marriage with an Austrian archduchess. Never, in the most splendid days of the Monarchy, had so many crowned heads thronged the shores of the Seine, never had the French aristocracy been so rich or so splendid. The diamonds lavishly scattered over the women's dresses, and the gold and silver embroidery on the uniforms contrasted so strongly with the penury of the Republic, that the wealth of the globe seemed to be rolling through the drawing-rooms of Paris. Intoxication seemed to have turned the brains of this Empire of a day. All the military, not excepting their chief, reveled like parvenus in the treasure conquered for them by a million men with worsted epaulettes, whose demands were satisfied by a few yards of red ribbon.