Today's Stichomancy for Stephen Colbert

He's five and forty, and to hear him talk These days you'd call him eighty; then you'd add More years to that. He's old enough to be The father of a world, and so he is. "Ben, you're a scholar, what's the time of day?" Says he; and there shines out of him again An aged light that has no age or station -- The mystery that's his -- a mischievous Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame For being won so easy, and at friends Who laugh at him for what he wants the most,

eight--and four is twelve--and two is fourteen--and four is eighteen." Here he paused. "And four is eighteen--and--four--is--eighteen." The last was very much drawled. Slowly the pencil slipped from his fingers, and the slate followed it into the sand. For a while he lay motionless, then began muttering to himself, folded his little arms, laid his head down upon them, and might have been asleep, but for the muttering sound that from time to time proceeded from him. A curious old ewe came to sniff at him; but it was long before he raised his head. When he did, he looked at the far-off hills with his heavy eyes.

"Ye shall receive--ye shall receive--shall, shall, shall," he muttered.

He sat up then. Slowly the dulness and heaviness melted from his face; it

been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest sorrow. The popular imagination, indeed, long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and the wizard Maule; the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a part of the Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between jest and earnest,"He has Maule's blood to drink!" The sudden death of a

House of Seven Gables