Well done! Now leave the sleeping acre to its peace.
The sun is risen; let it light the road.
Named for an emperor, in my abode,
The fourth imprisoned clue awaits release:
Beneath, the hours tell their names and go.
Above, a voice was silenced long ago.
“Who do we know that’s got an emperor’s name?” said Oliver. “I can’t remember any emperors.”
“There isn’t anyone I know of that’s named Nero,” said Randy. “Nero’s the only one I can think of at the moment. No, wait, Napoleon was an emperor.”
“Well, who do you know that’s named Napoleon, for Pete’s sake?” inquired Oliver rather sensibly.
They were on their way home from school, riding their bicycles through the golden October haze.
“And there were hundreds of emperors,” said Randy thoughtfully. “Goodness, there were emperors in Rome and China and Austria and France even—why, when you think of it, the emperors in history are a dime a dozen.”
“Aren’t there any left?” Oliver seemed a little sad. An emperor sounded like a splendid being: proud, dazzling, more than mortal, with rays of light around him like the petals of a sunflower.
“No, no more. A few kings, only, and some queens. Nowadays most countries are run by a man, or a lot of men, in business suits. In a few countries the most important man does wear a uniform, but still he isn’t called a king, though he’s treated like one. He’s called Marshal or Generalissimo or something like that, and his uniforms are severe and unjoyful looking.”
“Gee, too bad,” said Oliver.
“If only Father was home,” said Randy. “He knows everything about history; he’d give us all the names we needed. Who do we know, think, Oliver, that has an emperorish name?”
“What about Frederick?” asked Oliver tentatively. “Wasn’t there an emperor named Frederick, somewhere or other, haven’t I heard? How about Mr. Frederick, the butcher?”
“Oliver!” cried Randy, in delight, falling off her bicycle—though not seriously. “Of course there was! I’m sure you’ve done it again! Let’s go right back now, and see.”
“No, wait a minute,” said Oliver, who was less impulsive than Randy and liked to have things, as far as possible, planned in advance. “We’d better be sure where to look for the clue when we get to Mr. Frederick’s. What does it mean: ‘Beneath, the hours tell their names and go’?”
“Oh, I have that one figured out. It must be a clock, or a sundial; maybe it could be a watch, even!”
“It could be a radio,” Oliver suggested. “They’re always telling what the hour is.”
“Maybe. But what about that silent voice above?”
“Well.… It could be a radio on a table with a picture of George Washington over it, or some other dead famous person that talked a lot and made speeches. I mean it could be,” said Oliver, his imagination running riot.
“It might be the clock on the Carthage courthouse tower; the bell in the top hasn’t been rung since the war ended.”
“Brother, I’d like it to be there!” said Oliver, who saw himself hanging from the tower with Randy leaning out of the belfry and holding him by the heels. He could imagine the little blue paper, wedged in a crack in the wall, and the pale, upturned faces in the street below.
“It would be hard to keep it a secret if they hid it there, though,” said Randy, in whose mind a somewhat similar scene had been enacted. In this case, though, it was she who had hung head down to grasp the prize. “And anyway, name me an emperor who inhabits the Carthage courthouse!”
The next day, after school, they stopped in at Mr. Klaus Frederick’s meat store. Randy had prudently asked Cuffy to let her do the marketing for once. As she had never asked to do this in her life before, Cuffy had thought it wise to encourage her.
“Why, I guess so, child. Here, I’ll make a list. The family’s smaller now, so I’m sure you and Oliver can fit the parcels into your bicycle baskets.”
Mr. Frederick’s meat store was a clean, blank place with sawdust on the floor. They had never been in it before, only seen it as they passed by. Cuffy patronized another, Gus Vogeltree’s, farther down the street. This was a less jolly place. Beyond the shop there was another room, darker, where they could see big beef carcasses hanging from meathooks, ghostly in the gloom.
Mr. Frederick looked like a piece of meat himself—a cut of beef—red in the face, jowly, with two large hands, like steaks, placed on the counter before him. He wore a tight white apron, rather soiled, a stiff straw hat, and a pencil behind his ear. He did not smile.
“Well, kids, what’ll it be?”
Randy read from her list: “Six pork chops, please. And two pounds of round steak, ground. And have you any beef heart for our dogs?”
“I got beef heart, I don’t know if it’s for your dogs,” said Mr. Frederick ungenially.
While Randy was ordering, Oliver’s eyes were darting about the shop; at the big pale carcasses on the meathooks, the picked chickens lined up like little arks under the counter glass, the calendar high on the wall—and then, yes, his heart stopped, or almost did—for just below the calendar was an old-fashioned wall clock in a hexagonal wooden case, with a brass pendulum stepping sedately below it. The picture on the calendar above it was the thing! For, believe it or not, it was a picture of George Washington! Oliver felt that this was definitely an omen, and he was certain that on top of the clockcase a clue was waiting to be found. He kicked Randy, who said “Ow,” and when Mr. Frederick had turned aside to grind the round steak he pointed to the calendar.
“George Washington, like I said,” he whispered.
“I know, I noticed,” Randy murmured, looking at him in awe. “Oliver, I wonder if you’ve got second sight? Because you could be rich and famous if—”
But Oliver was not interested in such speculations.
“How’ll we get it?” he demanded in a whisper. Mr. Frederick, they both knew, would probably not be cooperative about letting them examine the clock. He would want to know why. He might be indignant. Nevertheless, Oliver decided to try to win him to friendliness.
“This certainly is a nice store,” he said enthusiastically. “It certainly is nice and clean and everything.”
Mr. Frederick did not reply. He slapped the ground meat onto a sheet of brown paper and twiddled some string off of a big spool on the counter.
“Is this your abode?” inquired Oliver.
This time Mr. Frederick looked up, possibly startled. “My what?” he said.
“Your ab—your house. Where you live.”
Mr. Frederick counted out six pork chops, slapped them onto another piece of brown paper, twiddled more string off the spool, and tied up the parcel. He took the pencil from behind his ear and holding it between his blunt red fingers—like frankfurters—he looked at Oliver.
“You kidding?” he said.
“Why, no,” said Oliver hastily. “Gee, no, I just—”
“And the beef heart, please,” said Randy firmly, interrupting. “For our dogs.”
Oliver stared at the clock in anguish. His attempt to placate Mr. Frederick had failed conspicuously. How would they ever, now, be able to reach the clue?
Mr. Frederick slapped the beef heart onto still another piece of paper, tied it up, and once again took the pencil from behind his ear.
“That’ll be three fifty,” he said. “Hope you kids got it. We don’t give no credit here.”
“Here’s a five-dollar bill,” said Randy haughtily. “I hope you have change.”
She felt discouraged; so did Oliver. Nothing had been accomplished, and Cuffy would be cross at the price they’d paid for the meat.
At that moment a telephone rang in the room behind the shop. Mr. Frederick went to answer it. Halfway there he turned and came back, carefully picking up the five-dollar bill from the counter where Randy had laid it and taking it with him. He’s afraid we’d run off with it and the meat too, thought Randy, shocked.
“Now!” said Oliver as they heard Mr. Frederick say “hello” into the phone.
The clock was high on the wall; there was no chair or stool behind the counter. As though they had rehearsed it, Randy lifted Oliver as high as she could (he was heavy, rather a fat little boy, and she couldn’t help grunting with effort), and Oliver deftly ran his hand along the top of the clockcase. He felt a deposit of dust and grit, touched something hard and small, and clenched it in his fist just as Mr. Frederick came back into the shop.
For a second no one moved. They stood as they were, ridiculously; Oliver still lifted from the floor in Randy’s aching arms; Mr. Frederick transfixed in the doorway. His red face grew purple, eggplant color; his little eyes were the palest blue, almost white; it was astonishing how fierce they looked.
“What do you kids think you’re doin’?”
His loud voice, wavering with rage, released the spell. Randy dropped Oliver with a thud and automatically flexed her tired arms. “We—why, we were just looking for something,” she said lamely.
“Lookin’ for something! In my store? Lookin’ for what? You tell me the truth, see, or I’ll get the cops after you. Gointa get ’em anyhow!”
“We weren’t doing anything wrong, really we weren’t!” Randy tried to explain. “People, friends of ours, have been hiding things for us to find; sort of like a treasure hunt, you know. We thought—they led us to believe—they’d hidden one of them here. On your clock we thought, maybe.”
“You have got the same name as an emperor, you know,” said Oliver helpfully.
“What do you think I am? Dumb? Green? Born yesterday?” inquired Mr. Frederick. “N-a-a, you don’t. Stay right there where you are a minute.” His left hand, still holding the five-dollar bill, lightly touched the handle of a butcher knife lying on the counter, his other reached out and opened up the cash register; after a hasty appraisal of its contents, he clanged it shut again, reached around the doorjamb behind him, still glaring at the young Melendys, and pulled out a chair.
“Stay where you are, see,” he ordered (unnecessarily, as it happened, for the children stood frozen where they were). They watched, like terrified rabbits, as Mr. Frederick bounded up on the chair and lifted the calendar from its hook above the clock. They saw, now, why it was hung so high, for it was used to conceal the little wall safe which Mr. Frederick was now engaged in opening. They watched him as he peered and counted, satisfying himself that nothing was missing.
“All right,” he said, slamming the heavy little door and replacing the calendar. He stepped down remarkably lightly from his stool, and faced them like a pirate still grasping the long sharp knife and the five-dollar bill. For some reason the things he wore—the long tight apron, like a skirt, the hard black-banded hat, the jaunty pencil tilted beside a face so far from jaunty—made him doubly terrifying.
“All right,” he said, advancing on them slowly. “But now get out, see? Get out and don’t come meddling again. And if you ever mention to anyone—to a single person, see?—about how you saw my safe or where it is, I’ll find it out, see? And I’ll skin you both alive!” With this he brandished the knife, and Randy made for the door. It was Oliver who remembered to snatch up the parcels from the counter; then he, too, was in the street beside her.
“What a horrible—what a terrible man!” gasped Randy.
“He never gave us our change, either,” said Oliver.
“Wild horses couldn’t drag me back to get it,” cried Randy. “But what will Cuffy say? How could they have sent us to that awful place? And all for nothing, too.”
“Hey, wait,” said Oliver, stopping in the street. “It may not be for nothing; I think I’ve got the clue.” He reached into his pocket and drew out the little object he had snatched from the top of the clock frame.
He and Randy stared at it, lying on his palm.
“The clock key,” said Randy quietly. In a minute they began to laugh. They laughed so hard that they had to go over and lean against the wall of the Carthage Municipal and Farmer’s Loan and Trust Building until they recovered. People went by them on their way home—it was five o’clock—and smiled in sympathy, wishing they knew the joke.
“Fair exchange is no robbery,” Randy said. “We have the key, but he’s got a dollar and a half of ours.
“I think,” she said a little later, as they were riding home, “that I have just about a dollar and a half left in my bank. Maybe I’d just better give it to Cuffy as the change; you know, without saying anything.”
“Yes, and then she won’t have to ask questions and be worried,” said Oliver piously. “I’ll chip in fifteen cents; it’s all I’ve got.”
When they coasted down the driveway to their house, the Four-Story Mistake, they could see the lighted windows shining. Randy sighed.
“It costs a lot to do the marketing,” she said.
The next day she and Oliver took great satisfaction in composing and sending a letter to Mr. Frederick. It said:
Dear Sir,
A dollar and a half seems exsorbitent for a clock key, does it not? But accept it please, and you may keep the change.
Yours sincerely,
The Robbers
A few days later Randy had a new idea about the clue. It came to her in the middle of her English History class at ten thirty in the morning, and struck her with such force that when Miss Kipkin asked her to name the originator of the Magna Carta she answered “Beethoven.”
She advanced her theory to Oliver that afternoon on their way home.
“I’m going straight up to the Office when we get back and look at the Victrola records,” she told him. “Beethoven did compose a piano concerto called the ‘Emperor,’ you know. I’ve got it all figured out. The Emperor concerto book should be on one of the shelves, and the next record under it could be ‘The Dance of the Hours’—I’m sure we’ve still got it—and the next one over it could be one of the Caruso records—he died long ago and was the best singer in the world—or maybe one of Richard Tauber’s. We’ve got all those, and I bet we’ll find the clue among them, and if we do we’ll know it’s Rush who thought it up; he’s always been the boss of the records!”
As she said this she thought of her eldest brother, industriously printing the names of musical compositions in ink on little strips of adhesive tape and sticking them onto the backs of the record albums. He had not cut the strips long enough and could not keep his printing small enough, so that on these labels Tchaikovsky was irreverently tagged as Tchai, and Beethoven appeared as Beet. Chopin, of course, was Chop, and Debussy became Deb. The compositions and performers were similarly abbreviated with the result that every symphony was a symp. and every orchestra an orc.
Oliver was deeply impressed with Randy’s idea, and as soon as they got home they slammed their books down on the kitchen table and pounded up the two flights of stairs to the Office. This was a beloved room, the children’s own, cluttered with all the evidence and litter of their hobbies, interests, tastes, talents, and works in progress. Rush’s care-worn upright piano stood against one wall, Mona’s masks and costumes hung on a row of pegs. Oliver’s electric train and tracks sprawled across the floor; his pistols bristled from the shelves. Randy’s paints and papers cluttered a table in one window and in another sat a row of weary dolls, all recently outgrown, of course, but never to be thrown away. Still another sill held jars of different sizes, and in these were twigs or earth each concealing a spun cocoon or buried chrysalis. These, too, were Oliver’s. Low bookshelves lined the walls, and above them, even to the ceilings, were pasted yellowing strips from ancient newspapers and journals, put there years and years ago by other children in another family.…
“Beet. Quint. A,” read Randy, from the adhesive labels. “Beet. Symp. 3. Ero., Beet. Symp. 6. Pas., Schub. Trio E. Honestly, these records are in a mess. Schub shouldn’t be in with Beet like that. The Beets should be alone together. Oh, here! Oh, here it is! Beet. Emp. Conc! But—oh, no. Oh, darn. The one below’s an album of Bing Crosby and the one above it’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’! Gee whiz. And it was such a good idea.”
“Heck,” said Oliver, also crestfallen.
“Well, I know what I’m going to do,” said Randy after a discouraged silence. “I’m going to write to Father tonight and ask him for a list of well-known emperors. It’s the only thing.”
“Send it air mail,” said Oliver. “Now let’s put on good old ‘Peter and the Wolf.’ Last time I heard it was when I was seven years old on a day that was raining and I had a stomachache and Cuffy was away in Braxton.”
Father’s letter in reply to Randy’s came four days later. “Here they are,” said the letter. “But why?”
“Look,” said Randy. “They’re all divided up in bundles: Roman emperors and then Byzantine; Holy Roman Empire ones and French (only two of them, of course), and then the Hapsburgs. No Chinese, though. He must have forgotten them.”
“Start with the Romans, they were the ones who thought it up,” said Oliver, methodical as always.
“All right. So first there’s Augustus, then Tiberius; then come Caligula and Claudius and Nero and Galba and Otho and Vitellius and Vespasian and Titus—oh, Titus!” screamed Randy.
“Titus!” screamed Oliver.
The emperor’s namesake was revealed, at last, as their dear fat neighbor, Mr. Jasper Titus, Oliver’s favorite person.
“Well, I never knew there was an emperor named that,” said Oliver. “But I think you should have, Randy.”
“I think so, too. I learned about him once,” she admitted sheepishly. “I don’t know how I could have forgotten.”
By this time, naturally, without even discussing it, they were putting on their jackets and soon were on their way to call on Mr. Titus.
“It’s probably somewhere in that old-fashioned clock he’s got in the hall; the grandfather one.”
“But that clock doesn’t work,” Oliver objected. “It just stands there without doing anything, the hours don’t even tell their names and go; that clock just always tells the world it’s three fifteen.”
“Poetic license,” Randy said. “Maybe the very fact that it’s stopped is what they mean about a voice being silenced long ago.”
“‘Above, a voice was silenced—’” quoted Oliver. “Whoever heard of a clock that had its machinery on top?”
“Anyway we can just look at it,” said Randy soothingly. “And he must have other clocks.”
They knew better than to approach Mr. Titus’s front door; that one was never opened. The whole activity of his house centered about the kitchen and backyard: kittens played there, ducks quacked and gabbled, and one red rooster crowed and strutted with three stout wives to praise him. Chrysanthemums were blooming in their bed, top-heavy and bending, and the last blue morning-glories, since the day was grey, were still wide open.
“Come in, come in!” said Mr. Titus. He was wearing a blue-checked apron and had a spoon in his hand. “I was just mixing up a batch of cookies, and I need eaters for ’em. Think you can oblige?”
Randy and Oliver assured him that they would make every effort to accommodate him and stepped with pleasant anticipation into the kitchen; they knew the cookies would be delicious: the two consuming interests of Mr. Titus’s life were fishing and cooking, for both of which he had great talent.
It was right that the kitchen should be the heart and soul of his house. It was a wonderful room with windows facing south, many large ornamental calendars on the wall, and a stove as big and black and polished as a concert grand piano. The oven door of this splendid object was modestly embossed with its name: Heart of Perfection. On the red oil cloth of the kitchen table there was always a tumbler full of flowers: nasturtiums or moss roses or petunias; anything the old man had happened to grab out of his tangled garden to stick in amongst the mint and chives and parsley that he kept there. Today there were some dark red raggedy chrysanthemums, picked too short, and a sprig of basil. Under the table the cat-basket was empty; before long Mr. Titus’s cat, Battledore, would bring more kittens to it; her last ones had grown up and gone off to seek their fortunes. His dog, Hambone, lay beside the splendid stove, which crackled lustily as it devoured its coal fire. Hambone was really old, much older than Isaac, and instead of getting up when the children came in he lay where he was, looked at them, and whacked the floor with his tail.
“Him and me we feel the damp at our age,” said Mr. Titus. “Hard to get up, hard to lay down; harder to set. The joints, they get corroded, just like old pipes. But then I never hankered much after exercise. Have a seat, have a seat.”
Randy sat on the good old rocker with its flattened cushion and Oliver crouched on a footstool. Both of them had noted instantly that, though there was a clock on the shelf by the window, it was just an old-fashioned alarm clock, and above it hung the bird cage which housed Tibbet, the canary. He was yeeping away at the top of his lungs; goodness knows his voice was never silent except when he was sleeping, so it couldn’t be that clock.… Pretty soon—after the cookies, perhaps—one of them would ask to examine the grandfather clock in the hall.
Mr. Titus sat at the table spooning cookie batter out of an old crockery bowl onto an old work-scarred cookie sheet. Everything about the place was old: owner, dog, stove, utensils. Tibbet was not young. Even the calendars were venerable, some going back as far as fifteen years. The current one was hung inside a cupboard door. “Don’t like the picture on it,” Mr. Titus explained. “I like a calendar with a real nice scene on it; moonrise on the water, maybe, or an Indian in a canoe. These young women they got on ’em nowdays—all dressed up in bathing suits and cowboy outfits and all grinning—they don’t appeal to me.”
“That’s what I like about this place,” said Oliver frankly. “Everything in it is good and old. It makes you feel comfortable. I like oldness.”
“Everything’s pretty antique all right,” agreed Mr. Titus. “I bought this cookie sheet in nineteen seventeen. This bowl, this same bowl, I used to lick the leavin’s of the icin’ out of when I was a boy no bigger’n Oliver. My Aunt Effie’s bowl, it was.”
“In our house things don’t last so long,” said Randy. “They break or wear out or the dogs chew them. They get bent or lost, and sometimes they turn up in queer places. We found the eggbeater, after searching for days, in with Oliver’s chemical set.”
“I was doing an experiment,” Oliver explained. “I wanted to see what would happen if I beat an egg or two in with some iron sulphide, just for fun.”
“What happened was a smell,” said Randy. “Oliver lost interest in this experiment and let it stand there for a week, and pretty soon the smell began to put out feelers like an octopus, and they had such strength that they dragged us up the stairs to where they were coming from, and that’s how we found the eggbeater.”
“Yes, but another time, Mr. Titus—this was neat—Cuffy couldn’t find her umbrella anywhere. Nobody could find it,” Oliver said. “I did, finally. It was up in a tree, opened out nice and tied to a branch. Randy’d put it up over a robin’s nest once when it was raining; she thought the mother robin would appreciate a roof. She didn’t though; she and the father robin were insulted. They went away and built a new nest on Willy’s windowsill.”
“That was when I was much, much younger,” said Randy.
“Year before last, it was,” said Oliver. “And, my, was Cuffy burned! Just as burned as she was about the eggbeater, and about the time she found the kitchen clock down by the pool—”
“That was when Rush was having the Turtle Derby; yes, and speaking of clocks, Mr. Titus,” Randy cut in, with what she considered great presence of mind, “that grandfather clock in the hall must be a real antique, isn’t it? I’d like to look at it again—”
“It’s old enough, I guess. Been in the family for generations. I let it run down years ago, though. The way it ticked, so slow and serious, why you could hear it all through the house at night. Made me nervous. Kept my conscience wakeful. So I just let ’er run down and slept much better after. Take this one, though,” Mr. Titus nodded his head in the direction of the old alarm clock under Tibbet’s cage (the Melendys glanced at it perfunctorily). “This one sounds real businesslike and hearty. Had it twenty years. Keeps good time, but the bell don’t work anymore. Gave up. Never could rouse me.… Well, what’s the matter, Randy? You feeling all right?”
“‘Above, a voice was silenced long ago,’” quoted Randy, rising slowly to her feet in a sort of trance, like Lady Macbeth.
“‘Beneath, the hours tell their names and go,’” yelped Oliver, leaping up from the footstool and beating her to the clock.
Under the metal caplike bell on top of the clock was wedged the precious slip of blue, tightly folded and well-concealed.
“How in time did that get there?” demanded Mr. Titus. “Here, now, what is that?”
“Mr. Titus darling,” said Randy, “please forgive us if we can’t tell you for a while; it’s meant for us, part of a secret kind of game that we aren’t allowed to talk about. Someone must have hidden it there when you weren’t watching. Has any of our family been to see you besides us? Before they went away? Rush, for instance?”
“Why, Rush was here, sure, just before he left, and so was Mark and Mona, too. Cuffy she’s been by two or three times, and some of your friends, besides; Daphne and David Addison, and Pearl and Peter Cotton. Willy visits pretty regular; but I haven’t seen your daddy since the summer.”
“We haven’t either,” said Randy, saddened temporarily; but the thought of the clue revived her spirits. “Well, please excuse us, now, but I’m afraid we must be going.”
“What! Before I take the cookies out! You can’t go now before you’ve even et one!”
They saw that he was really a little hurt; and the delicate warm scent of spice that now pervaded the kitchen was certainly delicious. They sat down willingly, but when the cookies were cool enough to eat it was found that excitement had impaired their appetites. Oliver could only manage seven, and Randy came close to choking on her fifth.
“All right then, run along,” said Mr. Titus resignedly. “Only soon as you can, you tell me all about it, now. I may be gettin’ on in years, but far as I can see the human curiosity don’t age a day. I want to know!”
“We promise,” they said.
As soon as they were out of earshot Oliver handed the clue to Randy. “Read it,” he said.
“All right. Listen:
‘Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocketful of gold,
A treasure trove in springtime,
Worthless in the cold.
Start from your doorstep
Faces turned west,
Up the wooded hillside,
Over its crest.
Down among the giant stems,
Down across the glen,
To where the cattle feed and browse,
And uphill again.
Find a prelate in a pail,
A crown upon a tree,
Find the garden of a nymph,
And there find me.’”
Oliver was disgusted. “They forget I’m only nine years old,” he said. “I don’t know what a prelate is. What is a prelate, anyway?”
“A religious person, a dignitary of the church, I think. We’ll look it up when we get home.”
“And where in heck are there any nymps around Carthage? Or Braxton either? I’d like to know.”
“It’s a figure of speech,” said Randy. “At least I guess so. Now, goodness, we’ll have to look up all the nymphs there ever were. Just after going through all those emperors, too.”
“Maybe we won’t have to. This one does seem to give pretty good directions at least. ‘Up the wooded hillside’ and ‘faces turned west,’ and all that.”
“Sounds like a good long trek, too,” said Randy. “We’ll have to wait till Saturday again. Gee whiz. It’s tantalizing. I wish I could write to Rush and ask his advice about all this, but we have to keep it secret, and anyway I bet Rush planted the things himself. Who else in the world would have thought of Mr. Titus’s alarm clock?”
It was growing dark. A cold breath rose from the fields and ditches. The crows sounded lonesome flying home.
“It’s an awful long way off to summer,” Oliver said.
“But it’s only thirty-three days to Thanksgiving, and they’ll all be home! And after that it’s only thirty-one to Christmas, and they’ll be here a long time then.”
“All my children are going to be taught at home,” said Oliver, and Randy agreed that she had decided on this course for her family, too. “But you’re still here at least, thank goodness,” she said. “Imagine if there was only one of us!”
Oliver had occasion to remember this remark when the next Saturday arrived.