clearness of thought might have placed him
in the very first rank of scientific observers. He was the victim,
however, of a universal ambition which prompted him to aim at
distinction in many subjects rather than pre-eminence in one. In his
early days he had shown an aptitude for zoology and for botany which
caused his friends to look upon him as a second Darwin, but when a
professorship was almost within his reach he had suddenly discontinued
his studies and turned his whole attention to chemistry. Here his
researches upon the spectra of the metals had won him his fellowship in
the Royal Society; but again he played the coquette with his subject,
and after a year's absence from the laboratory he joined the Oriental
Society, and delivered a paper on the Hieroglyphic and Demotic
inscriptions of El Kab, thus giving a crowning example both of the
versatility and of the inconstancy of his talents.

The most fickle of wooers, however, is apt to be caught at last, and so
it was with John Vansittart Smith. The more he burrowed his way into
Egyptology the more impressed he became by the vast field which it
opened to the inquirer, and by the extreme importance of a subject which
promised to throw a light upon the first germs of human civilisation
and the origin of the greater part of our arts and sciences. So struck
was Mr. Smith that he straightway married an Egyptological young lady
who had written upon the sixth dynasty, and having thus secured a sound
base of operations he set himself to collect materials for a work which
should unite the research of Lepsius and the ingenuity of Champollion.
The preparation of this _magnum opus_ entailed many hurried visits to
the magnificent Egyptian collections of the Louvre, upon the last of
which, no longer ago than the middle of last October, he became involved
in a most strange and noteworthy adventure.

The trains had been slow and the Channel had been rough, so that the
student arrived in Paris in a somewhat befogged and feverish condition.
On reaching the Hotel de France, in the Rue Laffitte, he had thrown
himself upon a sofa for a couple of hours, but finding that he was
unable to sleep, he determined, in spite of his fatigue, to make his way
to the Louvre, settle the point which he had come to decide, and take
the evening train back to Dieppe. Having come to this conclusion, he
donned his greatcoat, for it was a raw rainy day, and made his way
across the Boulevard des Italiens an