Today's Stichomancy for Ian McKellan

filled both hands with dust from off the ground, and poured it over his head, disfiguring his comely face, and letting the refuse settle over his shirt so fair and new. He flung himself down all huge and hugely at full length, and tore his hair with his hands. The bondswomen whom Achilles and Patroclus had taken captive screamed aloud for grief, beating their breasts, and with their limbs failing them for sorrow. Antilochus bent over him the while, weeping and holding both his hands as he lay groaning for he feared that he might plunge a knife into his own throat. Then Achilles gave a loud cry and his mother heard him as she was sitting in the depths of the sea by the old man her father,

The Iliad

became cold. The reverberation of their feet told that this passage was a bridge. They came into a circular gallery that was glazed in from the outer weather, and so reached a circular chamber which seemed familiar, though Graham could not recall distinctly when he had entered it before. In this was a ladder--the first ladder he had seen since his awakening--up which they went, and came into a high, dark, cold place in which was another almost vertical ladder. This they ascended, Graham still perplexed.

When the Sleeper Wakes

stately towards the entrance--Sussex followed by Tressilian, Blount, and Raleigh, and Leicester by Varney. The pride of Leicester was obliged to give way to court-forms, and with a grave and formal inclination of the head, he paused until his rival, a peer of older creation than his own, passed before him. Sussex returned the reverence with the same formal civility, and entered the presence-room. Tressilian and Blount offered to follow him, but were not permitted, the Usher of the Black Rod alleging in excuse that he had precise orders to look to all admissions that day. To Raleigh, who stood back on the repulse of his companions, he said, "You, sir, may enter," and he entered

Kenilworth

thwarted by her prevarications.

The case in its different aspects came up in court again and again until finally most of the truth was ascertained, enough to justify radical measures being undertaken. During this period the mother was discovered to be an atrocious liar; even with her last bitter confession that all she had said about her motherhood had been untrue, she manufactured more quite unnecessary falsehoods. In the meantime the family physician and the family lawyer had both informed me of the peculiar mysteries of the case and of the perfect mass of lies into which the statements of both mother and daughter led. This sort of thing had been going on