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"Porthos, my friend, you know I am descended on the father's side from the Prophets and on the mother's from the Sybils, and that I only speak in parables and riddles. Let those who have ears hear and those who have eyes see; I can tell you nothing more at present." "Go ahead, my friend," said Athos; "I am sure that whatever you do is well done." "And you, Aramis, are you of that opinion?"
"I am not to be led off in that way, sir! I say you saw two agreeable young ladies here evidently not indisposed to talk with visitors, as it's a holiday and in spite of that, you pass your time in the house with that old Sallianna, cooing and wooing and brewing," added Miss Fanny, inventing a new meaning for an old word on the spur of the moment, "and after that you expect us to believe you when you say you are not in love with her though what you see to like in that old thing it would take a thousand million sybils, to say nothing of oracles and Pythonesses, to explain!"
Curious how, even when peasants, the good blood keeps the good old family names! The Valences were ever Sybils. "I could make her a baroness. Yes! and I could give her wherewith to endow her state. I could compensate for the broad lands which should be hers, and which perhaps through me she has forfeited. "Could I do more?
He tells her the Prince could never suspect so familiar a present, and for the fineness of the work, it was a present for a Prince; 'For, said he, 'no human art could frame so rare a piece of workmanship; that nine nights the most delicate of the Infernals were mixing the metal with the most powerful of charms, and watched the critical minutes of the stars, in which to form the mystic figures, every one being a spell upon the heart, of that unerring magic, no mortal power could ever dissolve, undo, or conquer. The only art now was in giving it, so as to oblige him never to part with it; and she, who had all the cunning of her sex, undertook for that part; she dismissed her infernal confidant, and went to her toilet to dress her, knowing well, that the Prince would not be long before that he came to her: she laid the tooth-pick-case down, so as he could not avoid seeing it: the Prince came immediately after in, as he ever used to do night and morning, to see her dress her; he saw this gay thing on the table, and took it in his hand, admiring the work of it, as he was the most curious person in the world: she told him, there was not a finer wrought thing in the world, and that she had a very great esteem for it, it being made by the Sybils; and bid him mind the antiqueness of the work: the more she commended it, the more he liked it, and told her, she must let him call it his: she told him, he would give it away to the next commender: he vowed he would not: she told him then he should not only call it his, but it should in reality be so; and he vowed it should be the last thing he would part with in the world.
One of the Sybils was believed to have so sung, and the Romans, in their relief at the good rule of Augustus, thought he was the promised one; but they little knew why God had brought about this great stillness from all wars, or why He moved the heart of Augustus to make the decree that all the world should be taxed namely, that the true Prince of Peace, the real Deliverer, might be born in the home of His forefathers, Bethlehem, the city of David.
The sybils, of whom so many strange prophetic things are recorded, are all, if the Italian poets are to be credited, represented as very old women; and as if ugliness were the ne plus ultra of beauty in old age, they have given them all the hideousness of the devil himself.
There were much lore, too, in the sayings which were said by the Sybils, and holy, holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves which trembled round Dodona, but as Allah liveth, that fable which the Demon told me as he sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I hold to be the most wonderful of all."
When he had reached this state of mind, he was ready to proceed with his inquiries into the mysteries of the cheap and nasty necromancy of the day, and to encounter the rest of the fifty-cent Sybils with an unperturbed spirit.
Camillo shuddered, as if it were the hand of one of the original sybils, and he, too, arose. The fortune-teller went to the bureau, upon which lay a plate of raisins, took a cluster of them and commenced to eat them, showing two rows of teeth that were as white as her nails were black. Even in this common action the woman possessed an air all her own.
I know a Maiden Aunt, of a great Family, who is one of these Antiquated Sybils, that forebodes and prophesies from one end of the Year to the other. She is always seeing Apparitions, and hearing Death-Watches; and was the other Day almost frighted out of her Wits by the great House-Dog, that howled in the Stable at a time when she lay ill of the Tooth-ach.
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