Old Tony was beadle and sexton and keeper of the town records; and very nicely he kept them too. There was not a speck of dirt on one of them. He used to spend hours and hours polishing the records, and he scoured the tombstones till they shone again; and he had most of the inscriptions by heart. After an earthquake he was always most careful to put the tombstones back in their proper places, and one day, when he was doing this, he came on a stone he did not remember to have seen before. He called to young Tony, who had had a Board School education, to see if he could read the bits of words that were carved upon it.
“It seems like a foreign language,” said he.
“I can’t make it out,” said young Tony, “it is not carved, it is in the stone somehow. Looks as if it were coming through from the other side.”
He turned the stone over, and there, on the other side, was an inscription which both of them had read a hundred times.
“HERE LIES HENRY BIRKBECK,
MAGICIAN TO THE INSTITUTE,
However humble he seems to you,
His last foretelling is going to come true.
P.S.—You see if it doesn’t.”
