Merton was silenced.
Neither could foresee how momentous, to each of them, the question of property in corpses was to prove. O pectora cæca!
* * * * *
Miss Blowser is now Mrs. Potter. She married her aged wooer, and Rangoon still wins prizes at the Crystal Palace.
V. THE ADVENTURE OF THE OFFICE SCREEN
It is not to be supposed that all the enterprises of the Company of Disentanglers were fortunate. Nobody can command success, though, on the other hand, a number of persons, civil and military, are able to keep her at a distance with surprising uniformity. There was one class of business which Merton soon learned to renounce in despair, just as some sorts of maladies defy our medical science.
‘It is curious, and not very creditable to our chemists,’ Merton said, ‘that love philtres were once as common as seidlitz powders, while now we have lost that secret. The wrong persons might drink love philtres, as in the case of Tristram and Iseult. Or an unskilled rural practitioner might send out the wrong drug, as in the instance of Lucretius, who went mad in consequence.’
‘Perhaps,’ remarked Logan, ‘the chemist was voting at the Comitia, and it was his boy who made a mistake about the mixture.’
‘Very probably, but as a rule, the love philtres worked. Now, with all our boasted progress, the secret is totally lost. Nothing but a love philtre would be of any use in some cases. There is Lord Methusalem, eighty if he is a day.’
‘Methusalem has been unco “wastefu’ in wives”!’ said Logan.